Cheesiest Video Game Outros that Never Made It

During lunch break in high school, I occasionally played a video game called "Twisted Metal" on the Sony Playstation II.

A friend posted a photo of an ice-cream truck that reminded me of one of the characters -- "Sweet Tooth." In my struggle to figure out the name of the ice-cream truck-driving character, I somehow stumbled upon these videos.

Their artistic merit is unparalleled; all of the critical elements are present: awful acting and writing, scantly clad females and heavily oiled shirtless drones, spotlights penetrating through mist, guns, and cheesy pitch shift voice effects. All of this deeply resonates with my childhood ideation of what producing movies in Los Angeles in the 80's must have been like. It's almost like I can smell the hairspray, coconut suntan oil, and fog juice.

http://www.youtube.com/user/TwistedMetalGames#grid/user/137096099C931D90

Hauntingly accurate "singing" voice synthesis software

Read about and listen to Vocaloid Miriam, brought to you by Yamaha.

Choirs are always in need of more tenors, and now you can buy a pitch-perfect one from Zero-G for $150.

I am absolutely blown away by this level of synthesis; the level of sophistication is amazing.

ZFS Progress in FreeBSD

I've been watching the progress of my favorite filesystem, ZFS, in FreeBSD for a while now. ZFS v28 has been under test by the members of the freebsd-fs mailing list, and I have read multiple resources that have indicated that the performance of the ZFS implementation in FreeBSD is much better than in OpenSolaris; indeed, my Nexenta box only supports up to ZFS v26.

And now, ZFS v28 is now in FreeBSD-CURRENT:
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-fs/2011-February/010799.html

There is an excellent article in BSD magazine with some general information. The article is by Martin Matuška, who maintains a ZFS v28 patchset against FreeBSD-STABLE.

When I have some time, I'll be excited to migrate to FreeBSD, and to get away from the insanity that is (was) OpenSolaris.

How to Move Your Picasa Database and Use Multiple Databases

The fact that I cannot configure Picasa's thumbnail database location has been driving me nuts for a while. Fortunately, I found this utility.

How to Move Your Picasa Database and Use Multiple Databases

Kludge for running Samba in StormOS/Nexenta hybrid system

A very long time ago, I upgraded a bunch of packages on my Nexenta NCP 3.0.1 fileserver to their StormOS "Hail" counterparts; however, I encountered a problem with the samba package:

Setting up samba (2:3.3.2-2stormos3.2) ...
Starting Samba daemons...:ld.so.1: smbd: fatal: relocation error: file /usr/lib/libcups.so.2: symbol __gss_c_nt_hostbased_service_oid_desc: referenced symbol not found
/etc/init.d/samba: line 33: 17304 Killed                  start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --oknodo --exec /usr/sbin/smbd -- -D

Well, this was no fun. It looked like smbd was not getting a symbol it needed. I shelved the upgrade and forced dpkg to put a "hold" on the old version of samba, until I finally had an idea today.

I "grepped" through the /usr/lib directory in search of the provider of the missing symbol:

find /usr/lib -type f -exec grep __gss_c_nt_hostbased_service_oid_desc '{}' \;

... and I discovered that it was provided by /usr/lib/libgssapi.so.2.

baitisj@raid:/usr/lib$ objdump -T libgssapi.so.2.0.0  | grep hostbased       
0002ba80 g    DO .data  00000008  HEIMDAL_GSS_2.0 __gss_c_nt_hostbased_service_oid_desc
0002ba78 g    DO .data  00000008  HEIMDAL_GSS_2.0 __gss_c_nt_hostbased_service_x_oid_desc

Therefore, I added the following LD_PRELOAD kludge into /etc/init.d/samba:

...

PIDDIR=/var/run/samba
NMBDPID=$PIDDIR/nmbd.pid
SMBDPID=$PIDDIR/smbd.pid

# Baitisj: kludge for missing symbol
LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libgssapi.so.2
export LD_PRELOAD
...

Voila! My nifty ZFS fileserver now runs Samba 3.3.2.

DNG Support

For those of you who are looking for better RAW support, I suggest you consider installing Adobe's free DNG converter, and then using that to import your photos into Picasa. DNG is an excellent archive format anyway that is likely to stay around longer than your camera-of-the-year's proprietary format.

in reference to: RAW format images : Basics - Picasa Help (view on Google Sidewiki)

Firefox 4.0 Beta 10 has AWFUL font rendering!

Wow. Just took FF beta 10 for a test-drive, and I have got to say, the font rendering is awful. Look at a screenshot of Chrome vs. Firefox:




This may not look like a big deal in such a small sample, but trust me, after browsing for a few minutes, the eye strain was unbearable.

At this rate, I'm pretty sure that IE9 will regain market share after FF4 is released.