O’ BBS, where art thou?

For a number of Internet denizens, the “Information Superhighway” as we used to call it has always been a part of reality. For others, there was a clean segue from an offline world to an online one. Large online services started popping up, and many people found a doorway from AOL onto the Internet.

Some of us, however, started out in the online world in a different way. We used Bulletin Board Systems (BBS), which were small to medium sized “online services” that someone would run on his or her computer. The software would sit there waiting for phone calls, and people would dial with their modems into various BBSes and send mail, post messages, download files, play online games, chat, etc.

It’s a technology that I still think about and miss quite a bit. I always try to put my finger on exactly what it is about the BBS that I miss, and why the Internet always comes up short for me, at least in regards to the feelings I had for this now ancient online technology.

I thin it’s a combination of things. First, I started using BBSes around age 12 – it was a time in my life that I was really getting seriously into PCs (I had only had a C64 up until then), and the whole x86 world was a strange new land with so much to learn. BBSes were a doorway to both see new ways of using this technology, as well as talk with people much more knowledgeable than I was at that age. The idea of going “online” was still a fairly unknown and “computer elitist” activity, only those really in the know got online. It wasn’t an activity the average person would perform, it was the stuff of movies and urban myth.

I think, however, the biggest piece of it was the kind of community that existed on the BBSes. While the Internet is amazing, allowing people to talk to anyone in the world instantly, there was a kind of close-knit, cozy atmosphere to a BBS. For the most part, to avoid long distance telephone charges, people only dialed BBSes in their local area code. Because of that reason, the people you saw online were people that lived close by to you in real life. There were only a handful of BBSes in the area, as opposed to millions of websites. Everyone knew each BBS and the person who ran it (The SysOp or System Operator), knew what kind of capabilities it had and the history of it. And everyone pretty much knew each other. Perhaps it was different in bigger cities, but in my area, we had maybe 12 BBSes at a time with an overall user base of perhaps 130 people. We didn’t all like each other, but we all knew about each other, had our friends and our inner groups. Hell, since we were all in the same area, we used to have cookouts and other meetups, sometimes getting together to go to a computer show or meeting at someones house. I met a lot of friends on the BBSes.

I think the technology itself also added to the atmosphere. On the Internet, you jump from website to website, basically looking at a page, posting text here and there, but for the most part it is a browsing experience, hence the term “Web Browser”. On a BBS, you connected to a BBS, you were “inside” of it, selecting different options and interacting every step of the way. If you chatted with someone, you could opt to see what they were typing as they were typing it, it was all very up close and personal, very connected. For whatever reason, with all its marvel and speed and ability, the Internet just hasn’t achieved that for me. I think a number of services like virtual worlds and whatnot might attempt at it, but the BBS provided this atmosphere without the need to recreate something, ala Second Life or MMORPGs.

While there are still a handful of BBSes out there, most run now as telnet services off the Internet, the era is gone. For me, the speed, efficiency, and abilities of the Internet have forever changed the way I look at online life, and I don’t think I could go back to BBSes, which is sad – I’m just too used to being able to Google anything I can possibly think of. I do hope, however, that I can find ways of recapturing those same feelings with the Internet that I felt on BBSes.

As a post script to this article, there was a great documentary released a couple years ago that is dedicated to the BBS and the life around it – you can purchase it off Amazon.

Anyone else out there a former BBS user? In memory of my little board, here is a screen shot of the welcome screen I’ve saved over all these years.

Handle: Orson

My BBS: The Pig Pen BBS, run from 92-94 in York, ME and Portsmouth, NH (207 and 603 area code, respectively)

GRAAHH! ….. BOING

That was my day. Frustration, depression, and bouncing back. On the days when it’s not ruining my life, having an extreme drive (emotional, not car) can be nice, especially for the purposes of EXPLODING THROUGH LIFE’S CRAP. BRING IT UNIVERSE, AIN’T NOTHIN GONNA BREAK MY STRIDE.

Yes, I honestly believe that.

A while ago Leah made the decision to become vegan, and since then we’ve had a number of conversations about it. Mostly it’s just me playfully giving her a hard time, though I do completely respect her choice – I think the reasons for it make sense. She comes at it from a stance that many farms treat their animals horribly and thus we shouldn’t support said farms. Since the vast majority make up this group, it’s almost a guarantee that if you’re eating an animal product, it was treated poorly. Though there are exceptions as noted by the Humane Farm Animal Care organization (http://www.certifiedhumane.org). While I’m not ready to take the vegan plunge, I would like to eat more off this list to better support humane farms over megafarms interested in the buck.

One of the things I’ve always kidded Leah about is something I actually do feel strongly about. The extremist end of humane treatment toward animals are the animal rights people who do not believe animals should be killed at all. Aside from any arguments against this, I believe if you’re going to extend rights to life past humans, you shouldn’t stop at animals, they should extend to plant (and fungi, protista, and monera) life as well.

I was doing research tonight and came along this blog post from veganfreaks (http://veganfreaks.org/index.php?id=38). It kind of pissed me off (as much as a random Internet post can). It was an animals right vegan who had run into people attacking his/her ideas with the idea of plant rights. Now while I’m sure there are people out there who will look for any side of an argument to be against radical thinking, there ARE people out there that consider all life to be equal.

It would have been pure lunacy a few hundred years ago to say a pig had rights. Yes, I’m sure you can find some reference to someone saying so, but the vast majority of society would think the idea of animal rights insane. Now such an idea is common place for a good number of people. However, mention plant rights and people think you’re just trying to be argumentative. Regardless of how species centric I think it is to say a life form doesn’t “matter” as much if it doesn’t have a nervous system, if that truly was an argument, what would be the problem in killing a stunned or anesthetized animal who led a free life? The argument is either the animal feels pain, or the animal has inherent rights. If its because of pain, numb it first and give it a good life, ala humane animal treatment. If its because the animal has inherent rights to live, then so by God does my little mushroom friend. And yes, I honestly believe that. I think it’s shameful and hypocritical to have a strong moral stance on one life and criticize someone for having a strong stance on another.

I honestly believe that all life has equal importance, as shown by nature and the circle of life. Besides the thousands of reasons we need plants, they have living cells, eat, have offspring, the same as any dog or human. It is no more inherently right to eat a carrot than a porkchop. It’s just easier to justify because the carrot doesn’t have a brain to feel pain. However, the easiest path is not always the right one – as any vegan knows who deals with difficult menu selections, giving up favorite foods, or criticism from other people.

It is impossible not to kill life. Our autonomic functions kill microscopic life constantly. Eating and drinking, regardless of choice of food, will always kill life in one way or another – survival of one life is always at the expense of others. It seems to me the most honest, natural, and sensible choice is to eat all life equally, in an omnivorous fashion. What’s important is this statement is outside how animals are treated – treatment of animals should be humane, regardless of if they are eaten or not. And I support Leah and people like her who boycott those who do not treat animals properly. I do not believe it is an issue of consumption – it is an issue of respecting life. People cannot always separate these two ideas. I support a world that supports life equally and eats life equally, for we all come from and return to the same Earth. And while I’ve already gotten the “eating equally” thing down, it’s time to work on the “supporting equally”. I invite anyone who eats meat like me to take a look at that website at the top to eat least eat meat/eggs/dairy that was treated well. Every little bit helps.

(And yes, I support artificial life as well)

Multiple Monitors in Linux? No Problem.

So sometimes a bad situation can turn into a good thing if you find a way to use it to your advantage. As seen below, I recently got a new computer, and after installing Wine on it and testing it out with some of my current favorites (HL2, Civ 4, WoW) I was pleasantly surprised to see I could run them with few issues. I’ve run Linux for a LONG time now, since ‘96 or so, so I’ve always had to either dual boot or keep another machine around for games, big pain in the ass. Anyway, now that I could play games, I finally wanted to get a good video card. So I purchased a BFG GeForce 8800 GTS 0C2, and counted the days until it arrived.

Well, I got it, put it in, and everything worked great. I pumped my resolution up to 1680×1050 in all my games and nothing even flinched. BUT – as I was working around on my desktop, I noticed that everything seemed really laggy. I would move a window and it would stutter as it moved, when I was in Firefox I could literally watch chunks being written to the screen when I created a new tab, something was wrong. I read online and saw that a lot of people had the same problem, it seems that the Nvidia drivers 2D support was simply broken for the 8800, (it had until recently been broken for the 8600 but they finally fixed it with the newest driver release, so I’m hoping they do the same for the 8800 eventually).

Anyway, I was bummed, because while I play games sometimes and its why I bought the card, ultimately I need my computer for work. And if everything stutters anytime I do anything, thats unacceptable. I was like CRAP what am I going to do. BUT then I was like “Okay, wait a minute. I still have my built in Nvidia 6XXX (I forget the model), which has no problems with 2D graphics, and I have a monitor with two inputs on it. Why not hooked both my onboard and 8800 up to the monitor main monitor. Then I still have one port left on the 8800 for my second monitor.”

I did that, and life was getting better, but not quite there yet. I realized quickly that while xinerama is cool, I kind of wanted a separate environment for each screen. If I switched to my gaming screen, I no longer had a gnome toolbar because it was on my primary screen, and it was a pain. So I switched off xinerama and just used multiple X sessions on each screen. Now it was getting good, I had 3 screens (amongst 2 monitors, 1 monitor having two inputs), and each screen had its own desktop and toolbar. I could move between them just by moving my mouse off the screen. Which at first I thought was a good idea. But then I started playing games, and the issue came in – I’d move my mouse to the left to scroll the screen in my game or whatever, and suddenly it would go off the screen onto my other monitor, leaving the game. I could fix it for DirectX games because wine had a switch for it, but not for the majority of other OpenGL and non DirectX games.

So I found that if in your xorg.conf file, under the ServerLayout section, if you put the starting coordinates of your 2nd and 3rd screen past the ending coordinates of your first screen (and second screen for the third), the mouse won’t move to the next monitor when you push it past the edge of the screen. E.g. if your main screen has 1680×1050 resolution, it spans 1680 pixels width wise. If you setup your second screen to start at 2000 pixels in ServerLayout, then there will be “dead space” between them and X will not move your mouse off your home screen.

This was great – but now I needed a way to manually tell my mouse to go to another screen. I found a couple utilities that kind of did this. One was called mouse jail or something to that effect. It worked by scanning the location of your cursor and if it went past the edge of your screen, it would reset the coordinates back to the first screen (you would use this by enabling your mouse to go off the edge of the screen, and then turn it on when you wanted to lock the mouse to one screen, and off when you didnt). The problem was, it made the cursor look choppy and took up CPU time and wasn’t the perfect solution of what I was looking for. I wanted X to keep my mouse on one screen and then me manually press a key on the keyboard to move it when I wanted to. So there was another utility called SwitchScreen or something to that effect that was supposed to do this, but it only supported 2 screens, and I had 3. It seemed like it shouldn’t be that big of a deal to support 3, so I took a look at the source of the Screen Switcher, which itself was based off of the mousejail. And while both authors added some bells and whistles, the basic gist of it was a single line of code that switches what screen your mouse is on. And thats all I needed, so I recoded things into this:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <X11/X.h>
#include <X11/Xutil.h>
#include <X11/extensions/XTest.h>

int main(int argc, char ** argv)
{
Display * display;
int majorOpcode, firstEvent, firstError;
char * displayName;
int thisScreen;
int otherScreen = -1;

displayName = getenv(“DISPLAY”);
if (displayName == NULL)
{
fprintf(stderr, “DISPLAY is not set\n”);
exit(1);
}

fprintf(stderr, “Opening display %s\n”, displayName);
display = XOpenDisplay(displayName);

if (!XQueryExtension(display,
XTestExtensionName,
&majorOpcode,
&firstEvent,
&firstError))
{
fprintf(stderr, “XTEST extension not available\n”);
return (1);
}

XTestFakeMotionEvent(display, atoi(argv[1]), 0, 0, CurrentTime);
XCloseDisplay(display);

return (0);
}
This simply takes one command line argument, a number of the screen you want your mouse to be on. I called it “ChangeDesktop”, so I can say “./ChangeDesktop 2″ to have it go to my third screen, or “./ChangeDesktop 0″ to go to my first screen. Then I mapped “ChangeDesktop 0″, “”ChangeDesktop 1″, and “”ChangeDesktop 2″ to G4, G5, and G6 on my keyboard, and boom, I had an instant method of putting my mouse on a different screen without having to worry about it dragging off the edge and causing issues. Now I can play a game on my big monitor, press G4 and put the mouse on my second monitor, look on the web for something or whatever, then press G6 and get back to my game. It might sound complicated from this post, but its dead easy and really nice – I thought this setup would be hokey, but as I use it, its really nice to have a separate desktop for my gaming portion, I have all my shortcuts there related to games, keeping it isolated from my work desktop, and I can simply switch between the two using a key on the keyboard (and my monitor). Even if they fix the Nvidia driver, I think I’ll stay with this setup!

I Go Walking After Midnight

You know, it’s too bad that (as a general rule) it’s more dangerous to go out late at night. Everything is so peaceful and calming at night if you can get past the drunks and that instinct of being slightly more on edge. I had to go get something out of my car last night around 3am, and by that time the bars were all closed and everything was very quiet. The trees were just rustling slightly and the street lamps were making a nice glow over everything and it was like a whole different place.

What, did your mom buy you a ‘puter for Christmas?

So, after 7 years or so, I figured it was finally time to get a new machine. My old one technically still worked fine, but parts of the motherboard had melted/burnt, which kept causing video cards to fry, and I always had streaks across the screen, had to keep the case open as all the fans were crap, blah blah. So, I figured now was the time! And, I figured if I was going to do it, I might as well get some nice stuff. Not the best possible computer in the world, but it’s a pretty nice one.

First I spec’d out cases and went wite Apevia’s X-Qpack2 with aluminum trim. Its a nice micro-atx case with clear sides and LED fans. The clear case and fans were just for fun, but I really wanted a small case. I used to be into mega enormous cases, but these days I’m sick of huge amounts of equipment and crap all over the place. I just wanted a small but functional case. This one was small but also had 2 5 1/4 drive bays, 1 3 1/2 and 2 internals, plus a 500 watt power supply, room for 4 full-sized expansion slots, and temperature read outs on the front.

Next I got a Gigabyte motherboard with AM2 socket with basic on board ethernet/video/sound, I didn’t need anything fancy there. I’m getting a new video card and dont care about anything better than basic sound and 100 meg ethernet, though it supports 6.1 surround. I have a lot of applications I run on this machine, a lot of services and whatnot, so I wanted something fast – I went with an AMD Athlon64 X2 5600+, that’s two 64-bit 2.6 ghz cores, and got 2 gigs of crucial 800mhz RAM. The thing smokkkesss under Debian. I got a nice DVD multirecorder and a 3.5 floppy/SD/CF/SM reader. I kept my preexisting 300 gig SATA-2 drive and Hauppauge PVR-350, and the G15 keyboard Ryan gave me (see previous post).
Oh, and my favorite part, the new Samsung 22″ widescreen. I can’t say how much I love this screen.

So it’s all been together for a couple weeks, all my software is finally configured and running. Here are some pictures.

The screen looks fuzzy and dark here, but it is just the angle and the camera, its amazingly bright and crisp. I have the old 17″ on the side for my second monitor.

When the lights go out!

Its hard to get an idea of the size of the screen without backing up a bit. It takes up about half the desk, width wise. Depth wise its nothing!

And finally a shot of the side in the dark again, close up!

So as I said, its running Debian in native 64 bits, and when I say that, I mean everything. One of the great advantages of open source is packages compiled for 64 bits. I have the PVR up and running recording shows, the G15 keyboard working with stats on the LCD (as can be seen), the latest NVidia drivers with the monitor running at 1680×1050, OpenGL hardware enabled. I have my external USB2 500 gig harddrive (for backup purposes) hooked up with auto-power down enabled so it will stop spinning after 10 minutes. I also have it working well with my Brother multifunction unit, it both prints and scans, over the network, with no issues.

Also nice, I cut all my other machines out (except my laptop, I have it on a docking station now when not on the go to use it via remote desktop for programming). But I was sick of my big-ass server taking up room just to have a file server and IIS box with SQL/ASP for development. I figure why do that when I have a speedy machine and vmware-server is free? So I installed a virtual Win 2003 box on this box, the thing boots in 6 seconds, its absolutely insane. But I have Jormungand (My physical Debian box) doing all the server stuff now apart from IIS/SQL/ASP. I have it hosting samba windows shares for my laptop to use if necessary, and also shares out its network connection to my laser printer.

And a really nice surprise, and something that made me order a new video card today – I’ve been playing around more with Wine lately which I haven’t for a long time as its always tended to let me down. Well, pretty much everything I’ve thrown at it its been able to run without too many problems. After a few tweaks I have it running Steam (Half Life 2/DM, Counter Strike, etc), World of Warcraft and WarCraft III. I’m going to be installed Civ IV soon. The built in video is good, but now that I know this thing can play games and I don’t need a separate Windows box, I ordered a BFG GeForce 8800 GTS OC2 with 384 megs of RAM. I was going to get more RAM, but the price isn’t worth it considering I won’t be doing any HD with it. The thing is going to rock though, I can’t wait. I was recording a show, transcoding an episode of Doctor Who, listening to music and playing Half Life 2: Death Match with no issues, it was insane.

It’s pretty exciting for me, since I’ve never really had a nice machine before. I have to enjoy it while it lasts!

Montreal

Every time I visit that city I remember why I like it so much. I had a good trip with Leah there this weekend. As an unexpected but nice surprise, Le Festival des Films du Monde was going on, and we got to watch one of the “Cinema Under the Stars”, an outdoor screening of a film outside during the evening. We watched “L’Odyssee d’Alice Tremblay” which was pretty funny and unique. Despite sitting on stone steps the whole time, it was fun. Leah got lots of pictures, I got none! Can’t wait to get back soon.