This is just a friendly reminder to all your bloggers out there:
Please remember that even though the holiday season has begun, there is no reason why you shouldn’t be “picking it up.” 
Archive for November, 2006
Pick it Up
Happy Feet (2006)
For a movie called, “Happy Feet” the movie is not really all that happy.
The story itself is unfortunately overly convoluted and not particularly relevant to the lives of children.
The beginning of the movie follows the typical children’s movie fair. It follows the early like of the protagonist, Mumble. Apparently, these penguins for some reason have “heartsongs” that are basically just ripped off excerpts of a variety of pop music from throughout the decades.
Anyhow, since Mumble’s father dropped him when he was still in the egg he becomes abnormal, in that he cannot sing (only screech). However, as a compensation for this inability, he can apparently tap dance. This ability is not particularly unique though, as the other penguins seemed to pick it up rather quickly.
Eventually, because of his differences, Mumble is exiled from the group. This is the point where the film stops following the typical children’s movie formula and starts to get weird.
There were many political undertones that pervasively permeated the film throughout. In a way, they were making so many not so subtle suggestions that it was difficult to figure out what exactly they were trying to indoctrinate you to believe.
Ultimately, I think their over arching goal was kind of an anti-theocracy, socialist society promoting tolerance. Basically, if you just made Mumble gay, it would be basically contemporary accurate.
Then, of course, they beat you over the head trying to establish some kind of lame-assed ecological conservation lesson.
The bottom line is that children will either be scared by the violence, or bored by the politics. Either way the children lose out. I’m just said they are so blatantly throwing this shameful propaganda at the children of our nation.
QuickType
If you are like me, you find yourself constantly toggling ClearType on and off in windows. Sure, ClearType is nice when you are reading or writing something. But, for coding and design work it is a nightmare. Luckily, I recently found a nice little application that sits in your system tray providing a quick toggle for ClearType on your system.
Dark Room Update (0.8b)
Since I have been using Dark Room more than usual, I figured I would put in a couple of features that I thought would improve the experience for everyone.
0.8b Release Notes
=================================================Features:
1. ADDED: Neutral highlighting
2. ADDED: Cursor blink rate control
Check out the Dark Room Project Page
Or, just download now.
GVSU’s IT Policies
This is an update for those of you currently not under the thumb of GVSU.
For some reason, GVSU has always taken a proactive stance against technological innovation. To a certain extent it makes sense, given the intrinsic variability in bleeding edge tech.
Now, to put this in perspective, GVSU is not afraid to throw money at developing technology throughout the university, as we have better wireless coverage than most division one universities. However, they still maintain rather backwards policies as far as software is concerned.
There are a couple of issues that have been irking me lately. The first most pressingly was that there was no way to change the screen resolution in labs. All the labs have decent LCD monitors, but all the machines are locked at 1024×768 resolution, when the native resolution is 1280×1024. This is problematic because you not only get the blurring, but the pixel aspect ration is different so everything looks distorted. Luckily, have have figured out a work around for this.
The next issue is that Dark Room doesn’t work in the labs. The irony of this, is that Microsoft has already released the .NET 3.0 framework, but the lab does not even come equipment with .NET 1.1 (granted you can get this if you are willing to wait for it to cache on the local machine). My problem is that Dark Room requires .NET 2.x to run, and there is presently no way to get it in the lab environment.
Thirdly, the way permissions are setup in the lab, java applications run just horribly. You can monitor system utilization, and it systems to throttle the java virtual machine to around 2% cpu utilization, and only a fraction of available memory. This makes using any demanding java apps required for classes unbearable.
Fourthly, well this issue is one more of greater amusement to myself than anything else. When you go to the blackboard site, for whatever reason, you are greeted this this warning message:
Warning: Internet Explorer 7 – Microsoft has released Internet Explorer 7.0 as a downloadable update. Academic Computing is NOT recommending installation at this time.
We are continuing to test and have found incompatibilities within Blackboard as well as differences in the way fonts are rendered in various applications and web sites.
Please DO NOT download and install IE7 until further testing has been completed and we have determined how it will work in the computing environment at Grand Valley. We will notify the campus community when it is available.
Now, keep in mind that you cannot install IE7 on any machines on campus, so this message is obviously in reference to the personal machines of individuals. To make matters worse, MS is putting out IE7 with windows update. Ah yes, good times.
I’m just thankful there is a portable version of Firefox!
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