It’s that time of year again… time to reinstall Morrowind and install all the latest mods. Thanks to a revitalized thread over on Something Awful I have been sucked back into Morrowind and have updated my guide. The guide is available here.
I just noticed I had “Users must be registered and logged in to comment” checked in the Wordpress settings. It’s unchecked now so people should be able to make comments without creating an account here. You’ll still need to put in a name and email address and have your first comment moderated before your comments will be auto-posted.
I have been using LockInfo and WeatherIcon on my jailbroken iPhone for a while now. LockInfo just recently was updated to not require Winterboard, which is great. The only problem is that you don’t get the actual weather icons in LockInfo without Winterboard, and you can’t install the theme packages from Cydia without Winterboard (they have a dependency).
The solution that I finally found in a thread on macthemes2.net from the author was to drop the icons and plist into /System/Library/CoreServices/SpringBoard.app/ manually using ssh. To do this I had to:
1. Find the *.deb files for the themes and download them manually (the modmyi apt repository is http://apt.modmyi.com/2debs/)
2. Extract the deb files. Debian archives are Unix ‘ar’ archives, so you do ‘ar vx blah.deb’ which gives you a data.tar.gz file. Unzip that file to get what you need (the images and plist file).
3. Upload those files to the above directory on the phone and respring.
I discovered that the plist for the theme I wanted to use (Klear) didn’t have the LockInfoImageScale attribute (see http://code.google.com/p/weathericon/), so they were rendered at full size in LockInfo (read: way too big). I had to edit this in (I used 0.25 as the value) and reuploaded the plist file to my phone and now it looks fine.
It’s funny how you can find things sometimes. While Emily and I were going to the Cincinatti Oktoberfest, somehow we started talking about famous Arkansans. I ended up looking up J. William Fulbright’s entry in Wikipedia and came across some interesting quotes. In 1966, during the Vietnam War, he wrote a book called The Arrogance of Power. There are a few quotes from it on Wikipedia and I can see why they were included; they are especially poignant and very relevant even today, so much that I am ordering the book off Amazon. I’m just going to quote Wikipedia wholesale here because it’s easier.
In his book, Fulbright offered an analysis of American foreign policy:
Throughout our history two strands have coexisted uneasily; a dominant strand of democratic humanism and a lesser but durable strand of intolerant Puritanism. There has been a tendency through the years for reason and moderation to prevail as long as things are going tolerably well or as long as our problems seem clear and finite and manageable. But… when some event or leader of opinion has aroused the people to a state of high emotion, our puritan spirit has tended to break through, leading us to look at the world through the distorting prism of a harsh and angry moralism.
Fulbright also related his opposition to any American tendencies to intervene in the affairs of other nations:
Power tends to confuse itself with virtue and a great nation is particularly susceptible to the idea that its power is a sign of God’s favor, conferring upon it a special responsibility for other nations – to make them richer and happier and wiser, to remake them, that is, in its own shining image. Power confuses itself with virtue and tends also to take itself for omnipotence. Once imbued with the idea of a mission, a great nation easily assumes that it has the means as well as the duty to do God’s work.
He was also a strong believer in international law:
Law is the essential foundation of stability and order both within societies and in international relations. As a conservative power, the United States has a vital interest in upholding and expanding the reign of law in international relations. Insofar as international law is observed, it provides us with stability and order and with a means of predicting the behavior of those with whom we have reciprocal legal obligations. When we violate the law ourselves, whatever short-term advantage may be gained, we are obviously encouraging others to violate the law; we thus encourage disorder and instability and thereby do incalculable damage to our own long-term interests.
I haven’t seen this anywhere so I’m writing this up mostly so search engines will pick this up.
I bought a brand new Macbook Pro, 15″, one of the mid 2009 models. I’m using the 7200 RPM hard drive I bought for my 13″ Macbook, so I already had Windows 7 installed.
Everything works great except I had issues with the audio. The Macbook, as well as I presume the 2008 Macbook Pros, used a Realtek audio chip. I installed and reinstalled several versions of the Realtek High Definition Audio drivers from their website on my new Macbook Pro and had no luck. If you go searching for solutions for this you mostly get people telling you to reinstall Realtek drivers, use “RealtekSetup.exe” from the Leopard install DVD, and so on. I began to wonder if Apple switched audio chip suppliers, so I started looking at the PCI device.
The PCI ID for the sound chip has vendor id 1014 which comes up as Cirrus Logic. I then went looking on the Mac OS X Leopard install DVD which has a folder for Boot Camp drivers. There’s an Audio directory and what do you know, there’s a driver called “CirrusVista64.exe”. That turned out to be the right driver; I now have a Cirrus Logic CS4206A sound chip in Device Manager.
So apparently Apple has switched sound chips in the 2009 Macbook Pros. I haven’t seen this ANYWHERE so hopefully this helps out anyone else in my situation. Now if they’d only fix the trackpad issues…
edit (5 Sept 2009): Since I posted this, new Boot Camp drivers (version 3.0) have been released with Snow Leopard, which have fixed any issues I’ve encountered under Windows XP and Windows 7 (32 and 64 bit). Even right-click on the trackpad is working.
I had these uploaded before but I just redid them with comments. They’re available in the gallery.
It’s time for part three, day 2, in my series of articles detailing our adventures in DC. For the other articles don’t forget you can hit the ‘dctrip2009‘ tag.
Today we started out by walking to the Lincoln Memorial. This took us by the Iwo Jima memorial, through part of Arlington National Cemetary, and across the Potomac via the Arlington Memorial Bridge. This gets you directly behind the Lincoln Memorial.
After checking out the Lincoln Memorial, and getting some pretty nice shots of the National Mall and reflecting pool, we started walking down towards the WWII memorial. At this point I forgot that we needed to take a side trip to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, but we’ll just catch it another day.
We wandered around the WWII memorial a bit, then headed south through the FDR Memorial Park, along the Tidal Basin, heading for the Jefferson Memorial.
After checking out the Jefferson Memorial we walked up towards the Smithsonian Institute, to get to the metro station nearby. We took the metro back to Rosslyn, did some shopping and ate at Ruby Tuesday, then headed back to the room.
We did a LOT of walking so that was pretty much it for our day. Tomorrow’s plan looks like heading to Smithsonian museums, except the National Air and Space Museum, which gets its own day (probably Thursday).
Today’s pictures are in the Day 2 gallery.
This is the second in a series of articles I’m writing about our trip to DC. For the others you can hit the ‘dctrip2009‘ tag.
We started off the day with… trying to watch a Dream Theater concert in our room. Great start to a vacation isn’t it? My brother will have to post with the details, but we were trying to watch DT over the net at some concert in the UK. Unfortunately, the Internet access here at the hotel is spotty and wasn’t working well with streaming video. So we ditched the concert and went outside into the blazing sun.
The Iwo Jima memorial is right around the corner so that was our first stop. It sits roughly at the end of the Theodore Roosevelt bridge and is quite scenic. The memorial is surrounded by a pretty nice park and it was sunny and warm today so there were lots of people out.
After that we walked south towards Arlington National Cemetery. On the way there was a nice bell tower donated by the Netherlands government in thanks for being liberated during the Second World War.
We walked into ANC and started making our way towards the JFK memorial and Eternal Flame. The cemetery is very scenic, lots of trees, and of course many, many gravestones. There are no joggers, bikes, or cars allowed in most of the cemetery so it was very peaceful compared to the other parts of town we’ve been in so far.
After taking pictures at the JFK memorial we headed over to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Right as we were about to leave there, they started a change of the guard, so we stayed and watched the ceremony.
At this point, I wanted to try and walk to the Air Force Memorial, which just south of the cemetery. We started heading that way but apparently there are no exits out the south part of the cemetery, so we had to walk back around to the north part. Eventually we decided we were getting hungry and decided to head back to the hotel.
We ate a late lunch (it was 2-3pm at this point) and then decided to drive over to the USAF memorial. After 20 minutes or so of trying to figure out exactly what exit and road to take (this place is confusing) we finally got to the memorial’s parking lot. The Air Force memorial is on a nice little promontory overlooking the Pentagon and DC skyline. The memorial has very clean lines and is very well put together. It has lights all over it, so sometime this week I want to head back over at night because I’m sure it is all lit up.
We wrapped up our evening with a trip to the shopping area just north of our hotel in Rosslyn. This part of the area seems to be rather upper-class, with lots of apartments, condos, and business centers. A little further west, where we ate last night, seems to be mostly college student area. Overall it’s pretty nice having supplies within a few blocks.
Tomorrow the plan is to try walking across the Arlington Memorial Bridge, which leads straight to the Lincoln Memorial and the west end of the National Mall. I was actually surprised we were this close to the Mall – I thought we’d have to take the metro to get over there. There is a very nice metro station a few blocks north of here (Rosslyn) that we will utilize later, but I think that the Mall is close enough that we can just hike over there. When we want to head to stuff further out we can use the Metro.
All the pictures above (with bigger versions) are in the Day 1 gallery. Stay tuned for more updates!
This week, my brother (karnage) and my friend (captpancakes), the other two bloggers on this here site, will be in Washington, DC on vacation. captpancakes and I came here in 2000 and had a lot of fun, and I’ve wanted to bring my brother here for a while. Everything lined up this summer so here we are.
We drove over from Dayton today. The trip wasn’t too bad – the weather was nice and traffic was not too bad until we got close to DC.
I intend to try and write a post per day detailing the things we see and do and including some pictures. DC posts will be tagged with ‘dctrip2009‘ and I’ll be uploading my pictures to this gallery.
I’ll try to keep these brief but effective.
New Dream Theater album, Black Clouds & Silver Linings, drops on June 23rd.
Watch the video for the new single, A Rite of Passage, here.
Mastodon’s critically acclaimed new album, Crack the Skye, came out a little over a month ago. If you haven’t listened to it, shame on you.
Between the Buried and Me have been writing their new album and will enter the studio to record on May 31st. It’s currently untitled, but I believe more information will be released shortly.
Anaal Nathrakh, one of my favorite black metal bands, are releasing their new album, In the Constellation of the Black Widow, on June 29th. They’ve posted two new songs, More of Fire Than Blood and The Lucifer Effect, on their MySpace. Listen to them here.
In case you missed it, Cattle Decapitation’s new album, The Harvest Floor, is amazing and shouldn’t be overlooked. I was never into them until now. Yay for vegan anti-human death metal!
Comedy option: DRAGONFORCE RELEASED THEIR NEW ALBUM, ULTRA BEATDOWN, SOMETIME THIS YEAR (ITS SO GOOD I FORGOT THE DATE). IT’S GOT GREAT HITS ON IT SUCH AS, “A FLAME FOR FREEDOM” AND “HEARTBREAK ARMAGEDDON”! YOU BETTER GO GET IT AND LISTEN TO IT OR HERMAN LI WILL EXPLODE INTO MILLIONS OF LITTLE NINTENDO SPRITES! God, no. No. Don’t listen to this album. I haven’t even listened to it, because they’re an abomination. DragonForce are a joke. If you like DragonForce, go lock yourself in your mom’s flooded basement and wither to death while listening to Through the Fire and Flames.
