Month: July 2007

Unsurprisingly TSA no flight is wrong again

Some people still don’t get that maintaining a list of names is an idiotic way to determine terrorist threats and using that list to deny airplane entry is beyond moronic. Especially in the case where an 8-year-old boy isn’t allowed to fly home because he’s on the list of known terrorists.

An 8-year-old boy expecting to catch a plane home is denied entry for appearing on a terrorist no-fly list, reported MyFoxKansasCity.com.

Bryan Moore was set to catch his first plane trip when he arrived at an airport in Cortez, Colorado to fly home after visiting his sister, said the report.

According to the story, the TSA rules specify that children aren’t to be barred when their names appear on the list. Of course, given how poorly known the rules are by TSA employees, that’s small comfort in general and it was clearly worthless in this case. That shouldn’t matter, though, because the number of false positives from this are absurdly beyond any acceptable level of lost time due to error. Senator Kennedy has been denied entry to an airplane because of this list. Catherine Stevens, wife of Senator Ted Stevens, has been denied access to planes because her name is close to that of barred singer Cat Stevens. The accuracy of this list has been covered all over the web-o-tubes (hint: it’s horridly low). The problem with non-unique identifiers as blocking a mechanism has been well-covered by many security experts. Yet instead of implementing smarter security, our government just trims 20% off the list and calls it done.

Poor kid just wanted home.

[tags]8-year-old blocked from travel as a terrorist, Further proof of non-security of names of terrorists, Security , Terrorism, TSA[/tags]

Teens survive own stupidity – Darwin sad

Hey, I have a great idea – let’s taunt 2-ton creatures that can kill us and climb over the fence to make it more exciting!

The Kansas City Zoo plans to press charges against two teenage boys who allegedly climbed into the hippo exhibit and threw rocks at the two-ton mammals, zoo officials said.

. . .

Randy Wisthoff, the zoo director, said the boys, both 14, are from St. Louis and were apparently trying to impress a girl.

The massive hippos, which spend much of their days submerged in water, are often considered one of the most dangerous animals in the world.

In case you women ever wondered if you are in fact responsible for all the troubles we men suffer, here’s anecdotal evidence that yes, you really are. We do stupid things trying to impress women. Then 5 years later, you stop opening your legs and we realize our mistake. We’re really that dumb.

[tags]Stupid kids, Teens taunt Darwin – survive, Hippos vs teens[/tags]

A smattering of gaming goodies I’m checking out

I’ve been reading some of my new books and working on learning Blender lately, so I’ve gotten behind on posting again. In order to get something out for today, how about this brief list of a few open source gaming goodies I’m looking at:

  • Dungeon Craft: Pretty much an open source tribute to/remake of the Forgotten Realms Unlimited Adventures (FRUA) set from almost 15 years back.
  • Trackballs: It’s Marble Madness remade. Nuff said.
  • SDL Basic: Basic designed to ease game development via Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) support. I want to create, not just consume.
  • Dark Oberon: 3D Real-Time Strategy. This one caught my eye because the in-game models are based on hand-made real-world plasticine.
  • Mokoi: Gaming development platform. Includes a portable engine to play games developed with the included Alchera editor. Easier to understand if you just visit the site and read about it there. Still in alpha, but looks interesting.

    Imagine being able to create a game that is able to be play on almost any platform, be it a Computer, Console or Handheld. This is what Mokoi Gaming aims to do.

  • The Flexible Isometric Fallout-like Engine: An isometric engine designed to assist in creating 2D role-playing games (RPGs).

    For the ones that have never heard about FIFE: this project is an open source engine that aims to be a platform for the creation of 2D RPGs. We do also provide support for the assets of the original Fallout games. So FIFE will be a good choice for the creation of Fallout-like & even non-Fallout-like games under all major platforms (Linux, Windows, Mac) with the emphasis on easy modding.

And there are so many more games in various states of creation and decay. If you want to look in on the open-source gaming world as a player, programmer, or content creator, go see what SourceForge holds in their gaming trove.

[tags]Open Source, Gaming, OSS, Games[/tags]

Virtual KVM – multiple system control via network and software

If you have multiple computers you need to have running and available but don’t have space for monitors, keyboards, and mouse-type-thingies (it’s an industry term, I think), you should check out Synergy.

synergy: [noun] a mutually advantageous conjunction of distinct elements

Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware. It’s intended for users with multiple computers on their desk since each system uses its own monitor(s).

Redirecting the mouse and keyboard is as simple as moving the mouse off the edge of your screen. Synergy also merges the clipboards of all the systems into one, allowing cut-and-paste between systems. Furthermore, it synchronizes screen savers so they all start and stop together and, if screen locking is enabled, only one screen requires a password to unlock them all. Learn more about how it works.

Synergy is open source and released under the GNU Public License (GPL).

I tried this tool long ago and it worked well enough that I know it works as claimed. However, I was just testing it, as I didn’t need the functionality, so I can’t really speak on how well it works for regular use. (via LifeHacker)

Geico rejects claims from Optimus Prime

Here’s a look at what a letter from insurer Geico might look like in regards to claims submitted by Optimus Prime.

We have received your accident-claim reports for the month of June-they total 27. I regret to inform you that GEICO will not be able to reimburse you for any of those repairs.

. . .

Since becoming a GEICO customer in January of this year, you have reported 131 accidents, requesting reimbursement for repairs necessitated by each one. You have claimed not to be responsible in any of them, usually listing the cause of the accident as either “Sneak attack by Decepticons” or “Unavoidable damage caused by protecting freedom for all sentient beings.”

The list of some of the rejected claims is sufficient justification for reading the full post. The letter ends well, at least:

…but due to the high number of accidents you have been a party to this month, combined with the many accidents you have had in the preceding five months, your premium has increased to $235,567.50 per month. While that may seem like a lot, I remind you that it is a savings of $137 over Progressive and $98 over State Farm.

Pure gold. (via Consumerist)

[tags]Geico, Gecko, Insurance, Transformers, Optimus Prime, I just saved a bunch of money on my car insurance[/tags]

Unsolved mystery – tree robs bank – police mystified

I think we’ve got a case that will be extra tough to solve. It seems some clever criminal masterminded the ultimate bank robbery. With tree branches held on to his shirt and head by duct tape, one James Coldwell robbed a bank recently. Here’s some news of the robbery, as reported by police captain Dick Tracy (Hey! I’m not making this up – hit the link to see).

708a1bank2.jpgVideo surveillance of the Saturday morning robbery showed a thin white man leaving the bank in a shroud of tree branches, all duct-taped to his shirt and head. His short, dark hair and mustache were clearly visible between the leaves.

Tracy said police were tipped off by several anonymous callers after the footage appeared on a nightly news broadcasts.

“I think he was hoping the disguise would camouflage him enough that no one would recognize who he was,” Tracy said.


Checking out the image, I can’t see how he was identified. Maybe there’s hope for a not guilty verdict? Always a chance of reasonable doubt, right? Or maybenot guily by reason of stupidity.

[tags]Stupid crook, Dumb criminals, Tree robs bank[/tags]

Blender render settings tutorial

As so often happens, I find something of interest to me and share it with all three of my readers, even though I know it will be of interest to zero of them. Such is the life of a self-centered geek with an online voice.

Since I’ve been trying to learn new stuff (that’s an industry standard term – it means stuff) on the computer lately, I’ve worked a bit with the open-source 3D modeling tool Blender in my spare time the past few weeks. My artistic skills are roughly equal to my social skills, which means I’m pretty sucky at creating artistic content. Still, I’m having fun learning, even if it is something I’ll never use beyond fun-time play. While tooling around online finding more Blender guides and tutorials, I found this old but still relevant guide to render settings for generating final Blender scenes.

Blender’s built-in rendering options offer many different possibilities for size, effects, and quality. Different settings may drastically affect rendering times. The goal for this analysis is to discover the most efficient methods for achieving the desired image quality with the minimum rendering time. When rendering for animations it is extremely important to achieve the best results is the shortest time possible, since one second of animation represents 30 rendered images.

The author goes on to cover half a dozen different renders and show the visual output as well as the necessary run times to generate a frame. Now the tutorial is from 2004, which means current hardware improvements and probable software improvements have made these times far higher than what they would be if the tests were run on modern hardware. But the relative time is the important point, and the difference between the simplest render setting that gives good results to one of the best render settings that consumes loads of time for improved results is clear. If you have thought about playing around with modeling, I highly recommend Blender, the Blender noob to pro tutorials, the Essential Blender book, the Blender model repository, and any guides you can find (like the one I’ve highlighted here) that can help with render settings and content creation.

[tags]Blender, Tutorial, Tutorials, Render settings, 3D modeling, Open source[/tags]

I’m back! Did you miss me?

I’m guessing no one even noticed I was offline about 90% of the time over the past 8 days. My children and I traveled to my mother’s house while the wife was out of town. Mom doesn’t have an internet connection at her house currently, although I could occasionally but not reliably leech from neighbors wireless networks while there. Aside from over-eating a few times, thereby slowing up my progress on losing (a target of) 60 pounds, it was a very good week. If you care about my wonderful time away from home, continue reading below the pretty ‘more’ link. I assure you it is more tedious and dull than my normal writings – you’d be best served by skipping to the next post…

Continue reading “I’m back! Did you miss me?”