What happens when your parents go out to have a coffee, your brother goes to the movies and you’re left alone without electricity in your house while it’s raining? (It actually happened…) You tend to… take out that awesome Tequila bottle you’ve been keeping for a rainy day.

You pop it, and then, you have an awesome idea. Let’s take my mother’s laptop, which can handle pretty well for a couple of hours with its battery!!

Then, you realize it’s time to keep on writing that science fiction project based on that awesome game from your childhood. Hell, why not?

Ok. So, this is the Introduction, Prologue and the first revision of Chapter 1 and Chapter 2. It’s not completely checked, so, strange words/grammatical errors/bullshit may pop out from nowhere as well. If you read it, I hope you’ll enjoy it as much as I did when I wrote it.

Tyrian: The Story by Gerardo Galíndez is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.5 Mexico License.

I love women. I mean, they’re simply a masterpiece. They’re specially cute when they try to do man-related stuff. I truly love them. They’re charming.

Heaven knows how, but as my Facebook account is kind of… fucked up, I had to find another way of having fun. So, I opened YouTube and I accidentaly found a video of this awesome girl shooting a shotgun. The 4chan effect kicked in, and I couldn’t stop watching.

The first video I watched. It’s great.

The type of woman I dream for a girlfriend.

Breaking in two your skull.

Breaking in two your skull, reloaded.

If that dude had recordedfor 10 more seconds, I would be in the floor laughing right now.

Tyrian is this awesome game I was addicted to when I was kid. About a year ago, I downloaded Tyrian 2000 from a fan page which looks just like an official page, as it’s been released as freeware.

The game was written completely in Pascal 14 years ago. The engine actually handles sprites, so it’s a piece of impresive work. Even though it’s relatively simple to work with sprites, 14 years ago there was no Sprite class or anything similar. They did a very good job, and it was well received.

Recently, I started writing science fiction. I can’t say if I’m good or not, but I do enjoy it a lot. I previously wrote another story, but I didn’t like it much so I left it. Perhaps I’ll write it again, one day. So far, I have written only a small introduction, a prologue and the first part of chapter one for the next part of Tyrian’s story.

Tyrian

As usual, the text is protected by the Creative Commons Attribution-Non commercial-Share alike license. Should you like the story and/or have any ideas, feel free to email me, at gerardo.galindez@gmail.com

So, I’m sitting in front of my desk, my left leg is cramping (I had to hit Merriam Webster for that) as I’m practically sitting on it, in front of me, there are my Engineering Math’s notes, I have to study a couple of useless shit (really, it’s even less useful than knowing random trivia on Star Trek) and I haven’t started to study.

My poor blog was left alone for two months, more or less. Honestly, I haven’t had time, or what I should be saying, I haven’t had time to organize my time and do everything I want.

The Square Nine team was a mess. Almost no one has published anything in three months of existence. About a month ago, I desisted too. I’ll take it again, but certainly not now. In a week, perhaps.

Also, I’m not feeling quite well. I feel hungry all the time and I haven’t slept well (Am I pregnant?? Hell. I’m a guy. Phew…)  I just saw Isabel’s blog “Fue un café” and she wrote a very similar situation. So, she kind of served as inspiration for me to blog. Again.

I really miss this things. It’s unbelievably entertaining to blog, and when a good posts makes it past the huge wall of the blogosphere, after a storm of visitors, anyone feels invincible. I loved that feeling.

I’m in the need of help here. I really have to organize my life. My bedroom’s been a mess for over three weeks. My HDD is also a mess, in all Ubuntu, Windoze, and documents partitions. Also, my media library became a mess after I lent that disk to a random guy who managed very well to break it. That’s why I had to suspend my media library posts.

I don’t know why I’m actually writing this. I guess I really need to clear my mind, before starting again. If I’m succesfull in this week’s goal, restructuring completely this mess, then I’ll blog about it. I really want to. I miss it.

Hell. It’s easier to stop smoking than to keep organized. Time to move.

I enjoy going to school. I enjoy studying. I enjoy going to school. I enjoy studying. I enjoy going to school. I enjoy studying…

Ok, I don’t. I hate to waste time, and studying subjects that have little, to no relationship with my career makes me mad. Way mad. But I don’t have a choice, so I “try” to like it. Even though, I tend to complain too much about the way things develop. I guess it’s just that I hate lazy people with the idea “you’re the smart guy, so you do all the job”. I really, REALLY, FUCKIN’!!! hate it.

It happened (a few times but happened) during my first semester. It happened again during the second semester, a lot of times. Now, during the summer classes, it’s happening again. Thanks god, there were only a few activities that need to team up, and I worked with a friend, who gets the job done as it should be.

But my little disgrace, happened today. The teacher “explained” the definition of a new topic, and went directly to problems to work out. No further explanations, no examples, nothing. To get things worse, she told us that we had to work in teams. She looked at a friend and me, and then scanned the classroom.

We both know what crossed her mind. “Yeah, these two. Each one with the idiots over there. Let’s see if they can help”. It was painful. We changed places (in a bad mood) and started to solve the 14-problem sheet. It wasn’t long after I had to stop to explain “Yes, if you derive displacement, you’ll get the formula for speed, in terms of time”. That was both painful and sad. It’s basic, I mean, it’s not like I’m trying to explain the theory of relativity. Even if I did, there’s an easy, “simplified” version.

I thought it couldn’t be worse, until a guy asked who had the top average. The teacher answered she wasn’t sure if it was my friend or me, but that it was one of us. My “team” decided then, that it was a good idea to take turns to write what I was saying and solving.

At the end, I solved about everything we did, which was around half of the problems. I truly hate team working when I’m forced to work with mediocre people. It only slows down the tasks, it requires more concentration and effort, and in this cases, it truly requires an extreme dosage of patience.

I would love to work again with a couple of friends from Engineering. It’s painful to work with the “Lic’s.”. No racism intended, but at least in ITESM, it’s made way obvious which “types” get the job done… and the ones who only beat around the bushes.

"Your personality type" from Tooth Paste For Dinner

According to WordPress statics, our dearly beloved blogging service has been left without bloggers. What will happen now without them???

Proof of existence

Don’t worry, WordPress. Chuck Norris will certainly roundhouse kick each blogger’s ass in order for them to use you again. Which reminds me I should be writing a lot of posts instead of publishing senseless content. I saw it, and I immediatly felt the rush to do this. Sorry XD

It’s been a curios weekend. I feel extremely anxious and nervous due to the final exams. I know what will happen, but I don’t know yet what to do. It’s a pain in the ass.

Anyway, this post is about a two-stage religious experienice I had this weekend. I was kind of bored, angry, tired and some other things I won’t list here, so I decided that it would be a good choice to practice Java a bit. I launched Eclipse, and took my programming folder. To my surprise, I only had two classes left from the previous course: My actual final project, and the project of the systems engineers from Monterrey’s ITESM campus. As I didn’t know the second, I chose it as it sounded more interesting.

I started coding immediatly the class. Less than half an hour later, I had the basic scheme finished. It was kind of stupid to think that it costed me next to none effort, considering that only the basic scheme of my final project took me more than 5 hours. I felt happy, but at the same time I realized that our campus is the only one that offers a more-or-less complete plan studies, and it features some unique specializations.

Anyway, I really hate the ITESM marketing, so I’ll stop there. I wrote the code of the class, fought a little with an array of objects, and polished the interface. After testing it, I checked all the code, searching for errors. I found a very stupid one, I forgot to close a ‘case’ statement, so the next statements would be executed after finishing the one with the problem.

I opened space within the code to write the last command of the of my class. It was poetical. The last command I wrote was:

break;

I’ve just finished reading and incredibly mediocre post about Ubuntu Jaunty featured in WordPress frontpage. It contained a heavy amount of software, “helping” users to install software via command line in the way “sudo apt-get install (put your software here)”. Now that’s sad, as most people looking for information on installing something within Ubuntu will mostly be newbies, so it’s a quick way to scare them off. As I’m angry again, I decided to write this post to introduce the main new features of Ubuntu 9.04, in both the technical and the “mortal” way. May the force be with me… I hope I won’t end as that poor guy. So, here we go.

Ubuntu first impression.

The same installation since Edgy. Smart, easy and fast. As soon as you pop in the installation disk, the welcome screen guides you through. The installation (including tweaking original values) took me roughly 15 minutes, while an XP clean installation took more than 20. One of the main changes announced in the technical overview posted at Ubuntu Forums, was the increase of boot speed. Definitely, they accomplished it. It takes somewhere around a 25% less to boot, so it’s a noticeable change. Also, the graphic login screen has changed completely, it’s no longer the usual, beige + Ubuntu logo. It was replaced with a heavy coloured, dark screen.

As soon as the login is completed, GNOME 2.26 is loaded. The new stable version features major updates only. No new, shiny, bleeding edge software. Nothing noticeable here, as GNOME works very neatly and bug fixes rarely show up as it almost never fails. One thing I could see though, is that the CPU Scaling widget has been corrected. It no longer is randomly broken after each start.

The system introduces new features also, at system level, the “Computer Janitor” used to clean unorphaned packages, files and else consuming space in the disk. Another feature, is a new display panel (which I couldn’t use as my card is an nVidia, by the way) which helps with the connection of a monitor and/or TV. It was a daunting task to connect anything before, so it’s appreciated. Shame on me, as I won’t be able to use it for now.

Probably the most significant interface change in this version, is the new notification system. In previous Ubuntu version, an icon popped when an action was triggered. A rectangular icon popped up at the lower center of the screen each time the brightness or volume was adjusted, The network status was published as a cloud, Pidgin new messages were marked in Pidgin’s icons, and so on. Cannonical, decided it was way too decentralized, so they were bound to create a common place, were applications would publish their notifications. And again, it happened. They did it.

Notifications.

The new notification system is quite beautiful, yet useful. I only have a few regrets, which I’ll explain further. The new notifications idea model, as stated in Mark Shuttlworth’s blog, is to be a clean way to tell the user that something important is going on, without causing any clutter.

Notification system in action.

Due to the GNOME desktop integration, the notification system works for new messages within Pidgin, new e-mails received from Evolution and system messages, such as network status, volume and brightness. The system works like a charm, as it works exactly the way it’s designed to. It forces you to pay attention to important things, but it won”t get in your way, as hovering the mouse over makes it translucid while also being able to click underneath the pop-up window.

Translucid on mouse hover.

Now, although the system is neatly designed, I’m the kind of people who likes to tweak every other thing. Unfortunately, the notification system is not tweakable in any direct way. I’m pretty sure I could blow up a couple of configuration files to do what I want, but the point is that there is no option to change anything. Time, color, position and to build in notifications from other sources is what comes to my mind. It would be awesome if you were hearing music in your media player, and a notification informed you of anything going on in the player, finished downloads, title of a starting track, the end of playlist… Only two things would need to be built:A method to make a media player notify the system, and a method to make the window pop-up. That’s about it, and it would be a great improvement.

System improvement.

Besides the new and shiny notifications, there were major updates included with this new release. One of the most important, and that I liked the most, is the faster boot speed. Ubuntu was never slow on boot speeds, I’ve been using it on a constant basis since Dapper Drake (6.06) and it always booted faster than any Windows system, under any conditions. After the introduction of the XGL server though, things began to change. It was still faster, but not the way it used to be.

It was obvious, since the XGL server is quite complex and it demands a good quantity of resources. Boot times were noticeably larger, although it was around a 10% of extra time, which often was from 4 to 10 extra seconds. A fair price for the most incredible effects ever seen on a desktop system.

One of the main features of Jaunty, is its faster boot speed. The method which was implemented can be appreciated without using any system analyser. During the boot time, fans work at its top performance, which means, the CPU is working at its top performance. To accomplish this faster speed, Ubuntu consumes a larger amount of processor time to load the system.

This has two points of view: The good part, is of course, the lower boot time. The bad part, is the energy consumption. As the system takes a higher load over the processor, more energy is demanded. Indeed, this may not be an important factor in a desktop computer, but it is in a laptop. The battery receives a powerful drain at boot time.

Although it may sound drastic, on further tests, the data thrown was different from what I expected. The battery consumption is somehow the same in this version compared to others, but the boot time is surely lower. I couldn’t understand this, until I saw it from a different point of view. In previous versions, the boot time was higher, so, the system took more time to boot while using a lower processor demand. The new boot method uses less time with a higher processor demand. So, what actually happens with the energy is almost the same. Even though the processor consumes more energy, it does it for a shorter time.

In conclusion, more energy is required indeed, but not enough to actually make a difference. In my case, it’s a bit less than a 1%, as my battery is small. In larger batteries, it won’t even be noticed.

Conclusion.

Overall, the new distribution include a nice amount of improvements. Although it doesn’t feature new, bleeding edge software, it does include good additions. The faster time is a good feature to count with, and definitely, it was smartly built. The notification system, is also a good system.

I have no further complaints about the system. I didn’t like the time it took to boot since the addition of the XGL server, but it has been solved. The screen assistant was a nice addition, which will solve a number of difficulties. I should have had it for an Economy expo last month.

Even though it’s not a matter of Ubuntu, I do have a thousand complaints to a lot of software. The same way Keir Thomas said it at Lifehacker, Ubuntu was playing a catch up game with Windows and Mac. It has finally reached them, so it’s time to develop. I’m really looking forward to major platform upgrades. It’s sad that a number of people won’t completely change to Ubuntu, or a Linux based system due to the fact that they can’t manage completely an iPod, or use specific hardware, such as scanners.

Although the graphics server is great, there are still a number of things to be worked. AWN may be pretty, but it has flaws, and some factors that can’t be passed.

I’m happy with Jaunty, indeed. I’ll write a list of things that I think that need to be improved. Hopefully, in some years (or maybe less) I’ll be helping the open source projects not only by testing software and writing in my blog, but also providing real, programming help.

Coming next within Linux: How to completely manage an iPod on Linux, Media Players match up, AWN Configuration, GNOME tweaks and Complete configuration of an Ubuntu interface.

Stay tuned.

Ubuntu’s version 9.04 was released yesterday. Version 9.04 is coded “Jaunty Jackalope” and includes a series of major updates, as usual. According to the official Technical Overview, the updates included are mainly the last update of GNOME, updates in Kernel, boot performance, Ext4 inclusion and a new notification system.

I haven’t seen the system working in front of me, as the nearest thing to Jaunty I’ve been, is a couple of meters away from a CD-R with the ISO image burnt within. I planned a clean installation of Ubuntu, due to the fact that I’ve scarcely used Windows, or “Güindos Ve-esta” as JR an me named it some days ago. I thought that having a 50 GB partition for a system I don’t commonly use, is quite useless, so I’m formatting completely my disk. My thoughts end here. I’m installing Ubuntu. I’ll post a review as soon as I finish the system.

And now, the new logo of Ubuntu reflecting its philosophy: Free, gorgeous and ‘wow’ inspiring.

UPDATE: Read also the overview.

Ubuntu Logo

As I wrote in my about section, I’m studying Systems Engineering at ITESM. Although I commonly write in my blog about technology, Linux and many other stupid notes, after all this is my personal blog, a site dedicated completely to fulfill a simple task: To be torn apart as I want, saying whatever I want to say. Correct, incorrect, or anything else, without even taking into consideration if what I’m doing is morally or sociably acceptable.

So as that, I decided I wanted to write about some aspects of what is, and will be my career. These last days, I haven’t had much time to think in many stupid things of my life, but the feel that I should write about some general aspects of my university has passed from a vague idea to a serious wish.

I don’t know yet what will be my first post on this, but I’ll begin to plot some ideas. Right now, I’m only thinking in writing about everything related to university, but not limiting to a specific topic. I plan to write from stupid things like my irrational hate toward dominicans and other types of scum that usually wander around the CEM, to investigations I’ve done that took the shit out of me. Really, there have been a couple of projects that are plainly stupid, and are way too specific to find any useful information on the net.

I  I just hope to complete my MP3 tutorial before getting into this. I hate starting a lot of projects, and not finishing most of them, and it’s something I commonly do. Perhaps I’ll finish them both on the fly. Perhaps I should fuckin’ stop at once talking about the future and start working on everything I want to do. Time to get my hands dirty, again.

"The Red Thing", seen from far.

I couldn’t help it. I really had to post the red thing as the “artwork” for my beginning post. I mean, it’s the red thing… It’s part of the common life at the CEM.