Stupid Foot

A few weeks ago my brother sent me a link to Shards of Dalaya. I didn’t have much time to look at it when he originally sent it because I was busy with work stuff. Just yesterday I was at his place and happend to see what I thought was EverQuest 1 up on his computer. He was out in the other room and I decided to sit down and look around to see what it really was. After a few minutes he came in and confirmed that it was in fact EverQuest 1 but not really. It seems that Shards of Dalaya is EverQuest 1 but on emulated or reverse engineered servers.

Years ago when EverQuest 1 was the MMORPG big kid on the block my wife, then girlfriend, were huge into it. When We both finally sat down and talked to him and learned more about it we were both dieing to try it out.

Within an hour of being back at our house she had EverQuest 1 setup and patched and was logging into Shards of Dalaya. As of the time I’m writing this I still am futzing with it to get it to work. Shes running it on her older Alienware desktop, a 2.4GHz P4 with 1GB of memory. It runs just as good as It did back in the day if not better because she’s using a better video card now that she was before.

I’m spending time poking it trying to get it to work because I don’t have a Windows desktop or gaming box handy at the moment. I’m going to give it a shot in VMware Fusion on my Macbook and on my old HP Presario R3250. I’m not holding out much hope that I’ll get it working but worst case is I’ll wait till next week once I can get one of my computers home from work.

The 5500 I ordered of ebay came in the mail the other day. I was having a very busy week and didn’t really have time to play with it until Thursday night.

When I first turned it on it loaded windows ce then auto logged in and tried to connect to an Citrix ICA server. After some quick googleing I found out that by holding F9 while booting the T5500 will reset to its default windows cd settings. Once that was done I was greeted with a pretty simple windows interface with Internet Explorer and could browse the Internet and everything.

At this point I figured I had at least a neat toy if nothing else. I was really hoping I could somehow run linux on it which would make it much more useful for me. I went back to google and found that Puppy Linux has a very small installer that could be made to boot from a USB drive pretty easley, so that’s what I did.

Puppy Linux is actually more useful than I thought it as going to be. It ran well enough on the 733mhz with 128mb of memory that it would be more than usable for a simple email / web / writing terminal.

I wanted to try Knoppix and see how that would run but it was 2am at that point so I decided to leave it where it was and play more once I had time.

I’ve sense played with Knoppix on it and must say that it seem a little sluggish. I think the main limit is the 128mb of memory.

I’ll be posting more updates as I move along with this project. What I’m really looking for is something very similar to the Knoppix Kiosk feature. I’m even considering taking the latest Knoppix and stripping it very much down to get a simple X session with Firefox or Konquerer in a full screen window.

At the office today the idea was tossed around to replace our Point Of Sale terminals which currently are PCs that have a CPU, motherboard, memory and a cdrom drive. They boot a customised Knoppix CD that loads into a full screen Kiosk mode Konqueror. The start page is pos.store.domain.tld which is unique to each store with their local server.

One of the main reasons we are looking for something better is we seem to be going through cdroms about one every 5 months. That in itself isn’t a huge problem the larger problem is that we’re looking for something that doesn’t cost $300.00 for a new terminal. We actually talked about using the Linux Terminal Server Project but the Point Of Sale server is a 500mhz soekris net5501 and we didn’t think it would handle running its normal server duties along with X and KDE for 5 clients at a time.

I’m kind of hoping that I can get the thin client into some sort of kiosk mode then have use Internet explorer to load the same pos.store.domain.tld un full screen window. One thing that I’m a little concerned about after doing some research, which I should have really done before I ordered anything, but its too late for that, is that the one I ordered runs Windows CE 4.20 which seems to have a ghetto version of Internet explorer. From what I’ve read I think I would be better off with a thin client that runs Windows XP embedded.

I’ll actually be posting more as I work through this in hopes that someone elise could use this information too.

I was just catching up on my RSS feeds and came across a post on thenichestorebuilder.com linking to Jeremy Schoemaker (aka Shoemoney) where Jeremy shows you how to make $1,000 an hour. About half way into it it gets to be full of static and hissy. I immediately knew where this was going and by the comments on his forum it seems like he did a good job of pulling the wool over some peoples eyes.

In true April Fools fashion thinkgeek.com is up to their usual post some fake products shtick. I actually want to buy two of them though, the first is Spazztroids – Caffeinated Breakfast Cereal. How could this not be good? Caffeine… Check, Crazy Cartoon Icon… Check, Cereal… Check. The second thing I want is the Defendius Labyrinth Security Lock. I’m aware that it wouldn’t be practical but it sure would be a neat thing to show off.

April Fools also seems to hit slashdot and digg hard. On digg tons of stuff gets pushed up to the front page and it all seems interesting but it is a pain to sort out real news from the april fools stories. At least this only happens once a year, where the internet turns to crap…. oh wait…

With the rate at which Facebook is growing I’m going to assume that most everyone I know has an account. Normally I wouldn’t feel so conferable about making such a broad generalisation but in the last few weeks I’ve received friend requests from my mother in-law and some people I used to work with years ago.

Now that we are going on the assumption that everyone and their brother has a Facebook account and Facebook has setup their developer program there are literally hundreds if not thousands of applications that you can install. I’ve seen everything. Games like Warbook which is strategy style game which is kinda neat but gets boring quickly. Social applications like Zombies, Warewolves, and Slayers the basic premise of all three of these games is to infect or recruit you’re friends and build yourself and army which can then do battle with other players. To me this isn’t very interesting because you’ll see requests from your friends to join the games again and again. One of the more interesting applications I’ve seen is Friends for sale, this application allows you to buy and sell your friends. You end up making money when you buy one of your friends and then someone buys them from you. This one application has made me start to notice a few things about people.

• Girls seem to cost more than guys.
• The more popular someone is the more their cost is.
• Some people have way way too much time on their hands to be able to afford some of the crazy prices others are going for.

You can acquire money in a few ways with this application.

• You receive $2,000.00 every time you log-in and check the application, but only every two hours.
• You receive $10,000.00 for recruiting 10 friends.

At first I thought it would be interesting to script some sort of automagic log-in thing every two hours to build my fortune but I really do have better things to do than hax0r an online facebook application. Then I got to thinking how are these people making the millions they have. I’ve spent some time and the answer that I think fits the question best is that they really do login every two hours to check their facebook account. Call me crazy but I think I can find something better to do than check my facebook page every 2 hours.

I’m really waiting for some new cool applications to come out. I really do understand that the developer program really is very new and that with time the community will grow and evolve. I am looking forward to being able to use the next killer app that will be created by a 14 year old kid in his bedroom late at night.

The following is a quote from me on another one of my blogs, networknazi.org

I’m really starting to think that I’m trying to run too many sites and not able to give any one of them the attention that it would need to really grow. As of right now I have something like 5 blogs up and running 2 corporate home pages and a hand full of Internet Marketing sites. This is a sad realisation for me because I’ve really grown attached to some of the domains over the last few years.

I’m not really sure what I may do with some of the domains that I will not have time to update. Should I take them down by removing DNS entries? Should they serve up a blank index page? Should I 301 redirect them to one of my other sites? Quite a few choices here really.

The original plan was to use the separate sites to try to keep work and personal stuff separate but as time has gone on it has become more and more mixed together where people from work know my online pseudonyms and a few people from online know my work information so that isn’t as much of a concern anymore.

I’ll be keeping everything up with a few more updates or maybe leave everything as is until I come up with a final solution that makes sense.