TomSwitzer.com Tom Switzer's Blog

Cross-compiled 32-bit (x86) Murrine GTK engine for 64-bit (x64) Ubuntu (Feisty), so firefox32 doesn't look ugly. Just drop it in /usr/lib32/gtk-2.0/2.10.0/engines/ and your set. Can't really say if this will work on other systems.

Although this blog is very nearly dead, I figured I'd post this. I got engaged. If you know me, then you know Amanda. I proposed this past Thursday (Dec.20) and, of course, she said yes =]

Even 8 months after its launch, some people still seem convinced the Wii is just a Gamecube 1.5 with a gimmick of a Wii-mote. But the Wii is still selling faster then they can stalk the shelves with them. The Wii is a success. So, what has made it a success? The Gamecube wasn't a success, so a Gamecube 1.5 can't expect much better. Therefore, it's logical to conclude the only thing that is making the Wii a success is the Wii-mote. So, once everyone "gets over" the Wii-mote, the Wii's popularity will sharply decline, right? I don't think so. The Wii is more then just a sum of its hardware and software. Here is some of what the Wii offers on top of the Wii-mote.

I was in the mood for something sweet, so decided to make a sweet curry dish and it turned out really well. The amount below fed 2 hungry people as a main dish, but it could be stretched to 3. While I give exact measurements here, they're never as fun as just winging it, so modify to your hearts content. Here it is!

Serves 2-3

Ingredients

After reading through the comments here, I just got fed up with people's definition of "freedom" and silly arguing. Freedom is the author's freedom to choose how they license their software; whether that be GPLv2, GPLv3, BSD, etc, or just closing it up! The most important freedom is the authors right to chose how their own work is copied. I think it's great so many people choose to license their code under open source licenses. I think sometimes we lose sight of the fact that there is this amazing open source community that shouldn't be taken for granted. Instead, we waste time bickering over who is better by some subjective definition of free.

Alright, I've decided to vow to update this site more often. I'm in the middle of exams right now, but will be done soon enough. I hope to make some nice posts about some topics I'm learning about for various projects. I've been reading a lot of papers recently (mostly related to computational geometry) and, while it's interesting stuff, there are not many resources on the web to supplement the papers (read: make them easier to understand).

Here is a debian package for OpenAL 1.1.0. Debian etch only has version 0.8 which, while it is the latest stable version of OpenAL, is out of date. It depends on ALSA, libvorbis(file) (for Ogg/Vorbis support), and libsmpeg (for MP3 support -- SDL MPEG Player library). Enjoy!

I got a new kitty. His name is Chewey. He's freaking cute. I got some pics too!

I guess Sun finally decided to make the split between StrictMath and Math "official" in Java 6. It's about damn time. The slow ass trig functions in 5 always annoyed me, especially when they had another library, StrictMath, that was suppose to take care of the "slow but correct" versions, so the Math ones could be "fast but wrong." Anyways, god bless JIT compilation, x86's broken floating point arithmetic, and standardisation kicking progress in

So, after a serious session of web browsing, I found myself at the CakePHP web site. I had just finished reading an article on it, and wanted to check it out. So I went to the downloads section and was a little startled at first when I was greeted with a page that appeared to have no "download" links, but telling me I should donate. After about 10 seconds of frantic searching I figured out one of the donate buttons up top was "No Thanks," so I clicked and managed to find my way to the download. Not, however, without first getting just a wee shot of guilt from the developers of CakePHP.