So when I saw the title of this article (slashdot link), the first thing I did is check the calendar; nope, it’s not April 1st. Then I checked to see if it’s an article from The Onion; wrong again. So now I’m left wondering what’s going on. Apparently Microsoft will add support for ODF 1.1 in Office 2007, and not their new OOXML format.

What the hell Microsoft.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, the part about ODF being supported natively is great news for people who understand why truly open formats are needed. Good job Microsoft for finally implementing it. But the whole OOXML part is very strange. Microsoft has spent a lot of time and money conducted some questionable practices to get OOXML committed as an ISO standard. But you can’t actually USE this standard in Office until the new release?

There’s been a lot of articles online about this whole OOXML controversy, ranging from the various technical issues [pdf] with the standard to committee stacking and other irregularities in the actual voting process. I’m sure a bunch of this is just Microsoft hating, but with all the events and issues surrounding it, it makes you wonder. And the fact that you cannot use it in Office until Office 14 (release date TBA, of course) doesn’t help their case.

In reality, this doesn’t really affect me that much since I only use LaTeX for typesetting and PDFs for reading anyways. And really, it’s not that bad of a thing, since ODF is finally getting included as a supported format in Office. But this is not going to help OOXML at all, and so it begs the question as to why they’re not including it as a standard in Office 2007.

So in light of the whole Debian random number generator bug, I give you the following comic:

Hilarious.

Anyways, I’ve been working on painting my room (which means sitting on my ass for a few days pondering it and then finally doing it today), so I’ll update in a few days with real info.

DAMNIT.

DAMNIT DAMNIT DAMNIT.

I can’t run Team Fortress 2 on my laptop because apparently my graphics card doesn’t support pixel shader version 1.1.

I need a new computer. I can’t play anything on this one.

So finals are over, and I’m back at home. I’m going to paint my room for the hell of it, so after I am done with that, I’ll start posting a bit more and redesigning the blog.

When I was in high school, I took a photo of a cube and a pair of headphones, and I thought it was a pretty cool looking photo. But I haven’t been able to find it since.

Until today.

I ran into it by accident when perusing through my external hard drive, and decided to “gimp” it. Here are the results:

I’m pretty happy with it, considering I haven’t done anything like this in a while. I’ll probably use some elements from this picture when I redesign this site, which should be in about a week when all my finals are over.

Average: 39.02

Fastest Time: 31.50
Slowest Time: 54.84
Standard Deviation: 05.03

Individual Times:
40.80, 32.69, 37.02, 39.35, 38.70, 34.51, 34.23, (31.50), 43.12, (54.84), 39.87, 49.96

Not bad, sub40 average. I can live with that, considering this is the first time in two weeks I timed myself cubing.

So at the Denver Open, I was lucky enough to get an Eastsheen 4×4x4. I like it, much smoother than my Rubik’s 4×4x4, though like all Eastsheen cubes, it suffers from the problem of locking up a bunch. But along with using this cube and multiple edge pairing (6, then 4, then 2), my 4×4x4 times have decreased significantly. I’ve been averaging just over 1:30, which is much better than I usually get. Maybe at this rate I’ll get to sub 1:10 avg after all.

So I recently switched to Arch Linux.

All I have to say is, it rocks. The whole approach they take is admirable. Here are some screenshots of my setup in Arch:

On a side note, I will start posting some more cube logs and posts after finals are over.

Average: 57.21

Fastest Time: 39.07
Slowest Time: 1:11.99
Standard Deviation: 06.63

Individual Times:
(1:11.99), 58.89, 54.70, 48.70, 1:10.70, 55.28, 49.76, 1:00.46, 1:00.71, 1:01.41, 51.53, (39.07)

WHOA i’m sub 1min in one day! This method is really nice, I am glad I switched from CFOP.

Average: 1:31.66

Fastest Time: 1:02.29
Slowest Time: 2:00.94
Standard Deviation: 19.76

Individual Times: 1:47.05, 1:19.16, 1:16.27, (2:00.94), 1:17.00, 1:51.14, 1:49.80, 1:13.70, 1:46.59, 1:13.02, (1:02.29), 1:42.94

Eh, not bad for using the Roux method which I pretty much learned yesterday. The longer times was a result of me forgetting some alg and having to look it up. Hopefully I’ll get to sub-1min by the end of the week.