The Photo of the Week #001 - Biggest manhunt in Arizona's history

During my wanders through Flickr pages I stumbled upon this picture from freeparking collection. This wanted poster comes from boxes of family photos that the user inherited and which are really interesting especially those depicting scenes from the far west.
The poster shows the reward due for the capture of the men involved in the "Powers Affair", the biggest manhunt in Arizona's history.

An account from wikipedia says:

"In 1909 Jeff Powers and his family homesteaded in Rattlesnake Canyon and began mining nearby. When two of Powers' sons, Tom and John Powers, failed to report when drafted into World War I, Sheriff Robert F. McBride of Graham County delivered a letter to the Powers' asking them to come in for prosecution, but it was ignored. Several weeks later, on the night of February 9, 1918, Deputy U.S. Marshal Frank Haynes, Sheriff McBride, and Deputy Sheriffs Martin Kempton and T.K. Wooten arrived at the Powers' cabin near the Powers Mine. They carried arrest warrants for Tom and John Powers for draft evasion, and warrants for Jeff Powers and his hired man, Tom Sisson, for an unrelated charge. Just before dawn on February 10, as the Powers camp was preparing breakfast, they heard two of their horses gallop by their dogs began barking. When Jeff Powers stepped outside with his rifle Deputy Sheriff Wooten yelled, "Throw up your hands! Throw up your hands!" A furious gunfight ensued, leaving Sheriff McBride, Deputy Sheriffs Kempton and Wooten, and Jeff Powers dead. Marshal Haynes escaped to nearby Klondyke, Arizona, while the Powers boys and Tom Sisson fled south to Redington on the San Pedro River, leading to the biggest manhunt in Arizona's history. They entered Mexico south of Hachita, New Mexico, where on March 8 they surrendered to a U.S. Army patrol that had picked up their trail and crossed the border in pursuit. At their trial, all three men were convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. Sisson died in prison at the age of 86, but the Powers brothers were paroled in 1960, forty-two years after their conviction. They were pardoned by Governor Jack Richard Williams nine years later."


The photo is by freeparking published under this Creative Commons license

B-Movie cast 96 is out! - I Walked with a Zombie (1943)

A new episode of the B-Movie cast is available at http://bmoviecast.com/.

Check the website to listen to the episode and subscribe to the podcast!

The Treat of the Week #013

When smoking wasn't evil, advertisement from a tobacco friendlier time.


This is the title of a collection of tobacco posters published on Flickr by juffrouwjo.
I just hate cigarettes and I shiver when I think of a dozen years ago or so when you couldn't go to a bar or a restaurant without having your lungs filled of the pestilential smoke of the other patrons.
This flickr set reminds us of those days when wasn't smoke only accepted but also considered the natural companion of the healthy, sexy and moder men and women.

Have a look at the complete set here.

The Linux Game Box #5: Madness

In this installment of "The Linux Game Box" we are going to talk about Madness, a roguelike game that demonstrates how it's still possible to give the player a fun experience only with the scarcest need of technology.

Title: Madness

Genre: Roguelike

License: MIT License

Website: http://students.mimuw.edu.pl/~pm262952/madness/

Installation requirements --> 9

There's no need for installation in Madness. Windows users must double click on madness.exe. Linux users just have to open a terminal and run  python madness.py

Gameplay fun --> 8

In madness you control an adventurer that must explore 10 dungeon levels and defeat the evil dungeon master. Each level is dark and packed with monsters and objects like armor, weapons and potions. Like in a skeletal rpg your character will level up and get stronger. Unlike many games, the most precious resource in Madness is sanity. The sanity level will constantly fall no matter what the player does. When it reaches the level or forty or so a message will inform you that the colors around your character are getting more vivid. Then imaginary monsters like butterflies and ponies will begin to appear in increasing numbers. As the game help states "not all what you see is real. And not all of what isn't real is harmless...". This is an intriguing mechanism that gives the game a clear touch of fun. 

Graphical appeal --> 7

Graphically the strongest point of Madness is its originality. As it happens with roguelike games, the graphics is all made of ASCII symbols. Walls are made of #, your character's a @ and the monsters take the shape of their initials like the r rats, B bats and colored b butterflies.

Sound delight --> 0

Sound is non existent.

Story enchantment --> 3

The story has no practical use for this kind of game though is almost non existent. You don't know who you are nor why you're stuck in a dungeon and can only descend through levels to fight an unknown and unexplained enemy.

OVERALL SCORE --> 5.4

Madness is a skeletal game that manages, after all, to supply a fun experience. It will not last for long though because the mechanics are to simple and the graphics too scarce to keep a player busy for long. However I suppose this wasn't the intent of the creator. As a matter of fact Madness was made by hmp (humpolec[at]gmail[dot]com) in seven days during the 2010 seven-day roguelike challenge

One Indie Comic Jem #000 - Rice Boy

As you would probably know if you ever happen to flip through my blog, I'm a fan of the free and/or open source content in all its forms. I truly believe that the so called (often inaccurately) open movement can represent a more evolute state of the market - a glimpse of future. There are fields were independent content excell in such a way that is not possible to distinguish an indie product from a professional high budget work, for what that quality matters. 

For this and other reasons I want to start a series of post to present the best web comics that can be found online, at least from my geeky perspective.

The One Electronic
(Aka Terrin Oculon)

I want to start this series with a web comic that represented to me a true inspiration. From this comic I elicted my nickname and my avatar. This work of art is called Rice Boy created by Evan Dahm. Rice Boy is a fantasy story that takes place in Overside, a complete world shaped as a disk accurately described and populated by Evan of several species of creatures that dwells the three big continents of Arica, Wusterim and Grenth. Rice Boy is all about an epic and somewhat saint struggle between good and evil forces. But apart from the theme which traces out the most ancient archetypes of human civilizations, Evan creates its own cosmology, mithology, bestiary, geography and civilizations with accurate history. All this it's a genuine work that cast the base for different sagas and short stories that take root and develop from Overside. 
So much work has been done by Evan that a wiki is also available here to explore and keep reference of the various aspects of the comics.
Evan graphic style is also really intriguing. With its strong and net colors and the somewhat naives shapes, the drawings boost the sense of visionary and out of the world sensation conveyed by the comic as a whole. So does the narration which reminds me, at certain times, of the classic Greek poems I used to read at school; a flavor which enforce the epic journey of the character toward their fate and the fate of the Overside.

Map of Overside

Right now Evan web site http://www.rice-boy.com/ contains, apart from Rice Boy, also Order  of Tales that takes place hundreads of years before Rice Boy, and a bunch of short stories that explores the same world. 
Evan has published a volume containing the Rice Boy saga, two books for the Order of Tales story. All these books, plus other items like sketchbooks and posters can be found at the store. 
I invite you to read Rice Boy and the other Evan Dahm's works. At the beginning of this post I called Rice Boy a work of art. Read it and I'm sure you'll understand I was right.

One page from Book 2 of Rice Boy

High Plains Invaders

Just finished to watch High Plains Invaders and I feel like giving a fresh comment about it.
HPI is a 2009 Canadian movie made to be run on cable tv channels and similar. It was filmed in Romania by a Romanian company.
The plot is simple and straighforward: aliens bugs assault a Colorado town of the late 19th century and a bunch of citizens struggle to survive and then, later, to wipe the alien menace out of planet Earth.
As I said the plot hasn't anything original about it. The bugs looks like the babies of the aliens from The War of the Worlds, except they're not machines and don't shoot laser beams but uranium rocks.
The characters aren't bad after all. I especially liked that of a female bounty hunter that, even if unlikely to fit the historical period, has an enjoyable -even exaggerated- attitude of a though woman and speaks like a mob leader. Jules, the scientist, is interesting because he isn't the classic I-know-everything savant and sounds instead quite shocked by something his scientist brain can't compute.
All in all High Plains Invaders isn't bad. It's an enjoyable movie for a relaxed evening. If you like the western genre and sci-fi movies like me, then High Plains Invaders is worth a rent. Just don't expect to go anywhere off the beaten track with the storyline.

B-Movie Cast 95 is out! - Mesa of Lost Women

A new episode of the B-Movie cast is available at http://bmoviecast.com/.
Check the website to listen to the episode and subscribe to the podcast!

The Treat of the Week #012

That's so much fun!!!!

MWG - Fallout New Vegas #000

MWG stands for Most Wanted Games and it's basically my wish list for games, mostly for the XBox360 which is currently the game console I own.
I inaugurate the series with Fallout New Vegas due to be released in Q4 of 2010.
As you probably remember from my previous review of Fallout III, I'm a big fan of the Fallout series. I enjoyed roaming among the DC ruins as well as the other locations provided by the five expansion packs. However, as any true fan of a series knows, too much content it's never enough. Fortunately and contrary to what often happens with tv series, successful games tend to spawn sequels that equals mostly the quality of the original installment.
This week we introduce Fallout New Vegas through a teasing description from The Vault, the official website of the Fallout series.

Experience all the sights and sounds of fabulous New Vegas, brought to you by Vault-Tec, America's First Choice in Post Nuclear Simulation. Explore the treacherous wastes of the Great Southwest from the safety and comfort of your very own vault: Meet new people, confront terrifying creatures, and arm yourself with the latest high-tech weaponry as you make a name for yourself on a thrilling new journey across the Mojave wasteland. A word of warning, however - while Vault-Tec engineers have prepared for every contingency,* in Vegas, fortunes can change in an instant. Enjoy your stay.

* Should not be construed as a legally-binding claim.

What are cron and crontab and how to use them.

In Unix (POSIX.1-2008) or *nix systems cron is a deamon that, has its name suggests, has to do with time. More precisely it takes care of scheduling operations which must be carried out by the system at certain periods.

crontab is a text file containing a list of tasks to be executed at proper times. Both the commands and the times are specified inside the crontab file.

Each user has its own crontab files and there’s also a system crontab which takes care of scheduling system tasks as, for example, the log rotation we spoke in an previous article.

To use crontab the user name should normally be included in the crontab.allow file or, if such file doesn’t exist, then the user name must not be included in the crontab.deny file. If this file exist and it’s empty then usage of crontab is allowed to everybody without restrictions. cronttab.allow and crontab.deny files contain a list of user name and each name must occupy a line. Such policies and standard implementations can vary depending on the *nix system your using. For what concerns Ubuntu and Debian, these files are located in /etc/ directory.

Under the /etc/ directory there are commonly subdirectories and, among these, you should see also /etc/cron.hourly/  /etc/cron.daily/ /etc/cron.weekly/ and so on. If you have a script you want to run with a constant defined periodicity you can just copy it inside one of these directories and you will have it run respectively each hour, each day and each week. This is an approach that is related to an implementation of cron called anacron

However crontab allows much more flexibility for what concerns scheduling and to do so it necessary to edit (or even creating from scratch) the crontab file.

To write a crontab file just open it with your favorite text editor or type crontab –e to open it with the default editor (specified in the environment variable “EDITOR” – see the env command in bash).

When you open the file you will face something like this:

Note: Don't necessarly expect to find a crontab already filled with commands. It could very possibly be (and it's the case with Ubuntu) that your crontab it's blank and infact you'll be creating it from new as soon as you launch the crontab -e command from the terminal.

Each entry consists of a line with six items separated blank spaces. The first five field must be filled by integers that specify the schedule. The sixth field is a string to be executed by the shell.

Here below you can see a diagram of a crontab line

As you can see by selecting the proper values you can compose any type of schedule you need.
There are also special character that can be used instead of or together with the integers.

[*] Asterisk – The asterisk is for every value. Therefore to put an * in the hour field would mean that the command should be scheduled to run every hour.

[,] Comma – The comma character is used to run a command more than one time within a specific range of time. By writing 1, 15 in the hour field it means that the command will run at 1 A.M. and 3 P.M.

[-] Dash – The dash character specifies an inclusive range and it’s used to run a command continuously with a certain period of time. Specify 1-32 in the minute field to run a command continuously for 32 minutes.

Please note that a certain date can be specified either with Day of the Month field and Day of the Week field. Just pay attention to this situation in order to avoid weird behavior to occur. For example if you want to run a command the 5th day of each month, mark the DoW field with an asterisk so that the command can run at the specific day disregarding which day of the week it is.

We said before that every entry correspond to one line. However blank lines and lines that begins with # are ignored.

There are a bunch of environment variables that can affect the behavior of cron. The most common are EDITOR, LANG, LC_ALL, LC_TYPE, LC_MESSAGE, NLSPATH, LC_MESSAGES. These concern mostly advanced configuration so the default values should be ok unless you want to change the default editor with your favorite one.

A particular mention is to the variable DISPLAY which defines the default display. This information can be used to use cron to run graphical applications by specifying which display must show the application. This can be made by writing something like the following:

* 20 * * * env DISPLAY=:0 /usr/bin/evolution

By doing this you will tell cron to run Evolution mail client every day at 8 pm on the default display.

Note: if you’re a Ubuntu user, there’s a workaround to be applied in order to make this working in Karmic Koala. Please refer to the Ubuntu official documentation.

Before finishing the article let’s have a look at the most common errors you can encounter while hacking with crontab. Please note that modifications to crontab and the command excuted from its schedule, are logged in /var/log/syslog. If you spot a malfunctioning in your schedule try to check this log to acquire precious information.

- Every crontab file must end with a newline. If you create add an entry to an existing crontab file (or you create a new one) and you forget the newline, your job will never be run.

- As a corollary of the above, note that the % character in the sixth field will be considered a newline. Any character preceded by a \ will be escaped and therefore treated literelly.

- Lines that begins with # or blank lines are ignored

- If you add a user to your crontab.allow list you must also somehow re-edit the crontab files because otherwise the user will not be allowed to execute jobs.

- In order to avoid weird behaviors or fails to execute jobs for certain users, take the precaution to specify the full path of the command to be executed.

- if you try to run a command that needs super user privileges with your user's crontab you will fail. To run something like chkrootkit, as in the example above, you must add the command to the system crontab. To do so type sudo crontab -e in a terminal and prompt the superuser password when prompted to do so.

Note that it’s not really a good idea to edit the system crontab in /etc/crontab not only because you could create possible damages but also because during the system updates you could find your jobs erased. Unless you have particular needs and you know what you’re doing and why you’re doing it, it’s much safer to edit the user crontab with crontab –e.

This is almost all the basic information about cron and crontab. I invite you to refer to the man pages for information.

Live long and prosper

Modern times

Image by XKCD

The Treat of the Week #011

I always like buying toys for my kid, especially when it's a color shifting hotwheels creepy car called Rodzilla!!

How to use twitter from the terminal

I consider Twitter a fairly useful and funny way to share and get information. I don’t belong to the horde of people who sanctify Twitter like the Deep Thought of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I wish them to get their 42 at some point of their savant blabbing about the wonders of this web 2.O icon.

I used to twitter from the web page but I soon got tired of it because it was uncomfortable to switch back and forth to the twitter tab. A better way is using a dedicated widget like twitdeck which is a fancy Adobe Air program that organizes all your twits, contacts and personal messages. Twitdeck does the job but it sometimes makes my fan spin a bit too much for my taste.

I knew that Twitter API were available and thus I googled to find some Linux native Twitter clients. Imagine my surprise when I stumbled upon Twyt.

Twyt is a Python Twitter client, written by Andrew Price and based on classes of the afore mentioned Twitter API. It allows to do almost everything you can do from the web client or some other fancy widgets, but from the terminal.

If you have Ubuntu, like me, you will find the python-twyt package on the repositories. Otherwise you need to download Twyt from here, unpack it with tar -xvf twyt-0.2.2.tar.gz and install with ./setup.py install. Should you have problems running it at first shot try install python and python-simplejson to saftisfy the dependencies.

The most basic command is tweet[options]. Thus after having completed the installation open a terminal like bash and type:

-u is the option needed to specify the username that in my case is followed by wizandchips

You will then prompted to insert your password  and the magic's done. You can specify the password with -p but the author does well to discourage this practice on the command line. You could instead save the password for the session using the command twyt user -u USERNAME -p PASSWORD set. This is at least the method from version 0.9.0. I've got the 0.9.2 installed and for me I had to close bash and open it up again because otherwise I god a bad user/password message at every tweet attempt.

Twyt offers several other commands to delete status messages by ID with delete [options] id, to show the latest public messages (max 20) with publictl [options], show your friends messages (max 20) with friendstl [options] [username], show your messages with usertl [options] [username], and so on.
You can find the detail of all the commands for the client reading the manual through bash by typing man twyt.

Twyt is released under the BSD license

The Treat of the Week #010

Caricature Map of Europe - 1914 by keiththompsonart

The new Ubuntu Theme on 10.04 Lucid Lynx

I don’t hide the fact that I’m really excited today.
I read on Phoronix that Canonical’s revealed the new theme that will be part of the forthcoming 10.04 release of Ubuntu.
Since the day I read that Mark Shuttleworth left the CEO job to dedicate himself to the feel and look of the product, I knew something was going to happen. However I didn’t expect a radical push so soon. It was clear since long that the brown Human theme got the nerves of mass of users, and Mark knew this. Here though we’re speaking of a big change in all the Ubuntu brand. The changes are presented in two wiki pages, here and here, and they concern:

- New logos for the various Ubuntu related projects
- A new Ubuntu theme called “Light”
- A new minimalistic splash screen
- New layouts for the various website of the ecosphere
- Promotional materials

The team reviewed the logo to “reflect the precision and engineering that sits at the heart of the product”. I appreciate the effort of rejuvenating the image of Ubuntu by I don’t really feel the new logo worth to represent the final product. I know this is harsh but to me it seems too unbalanced, graphically, and the lettering too exotic. I’d have preferred something more consistent with the concept of stability and technical supremacy, but this is just my idea and largely based on personal preferences.

The theme is simply great. They presented a dark and a light version. I like the dark one much more but this is also based on personal preference because they’re both great. The design theme just followed the way already taken with the Karmic Koala release. The brown color has given place to a nice tone of violet. The icons are monochromatic and are implemented following the kde specification. As a result the top bar feels really solid. The gtk widgets got a refreshed appeal and even though there are certainly some rough edges in the design, the intent of increasing the sensation of a carefully designed operating system interface is real.

The effort is clear and the quality is there. Not everything is perfect but, from an end user’s point of view, Ubuntu’s life cycle of releases is bringing fantastic improvements on a six months schedule. I can’t do anything but feel excited to be somehow part of this incredible project that, I’m sure, is contributing to bring new Linux users with every release.

The Linux Game Box #5: GNU Robbo

I took a pause from playing to Mass Effect 2 on the Xbox360 to give a try to another Linux game in the series.

This time the game’s called GNU Robbo, a reimplementation of an old 1989 game for the Atari XE/XL console.
GNU Robbo is a puzzle game in which you control a robot aiming to escape mazes by solving puzzles and collecting items.
GNU Robbo project is being developed and kept alive by Arkadiusz Lipiec, Marcin Klimczewski, enjomitch and Cyprian Zawadzki

Title: GNU Robbo
Genre: puzzle game
License: GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE Version 2, June 1991
Website: http://gnurobbo.sourceforge.net/

Installation requirements --> 9

The web site has a page dedicate to the multiple version of the game for each specific OS. For Linux packages are already ready to be installed via synaptic. Instruction for installing via RPM are listed in the help page of the website.

Gameplay fun --> 9

The player controls a robot that must escape from a maze by collecting a certain number of screws in order to open the gate leading to the following level. By doing so the robot must find its way by moving blocks, destroy others with its laser gun and avoid threats like laser beams and monsters. As far as I have played, the difficulty curve is very flat but the simplicity of the concept and gameplay make the game highly addictive. At certain times I found myself unable to quit trying pass a certain level where, despite of the simplicity, I was getting continuously killed by one of the swarming monsters.

Graphical appeal --> 8

GNU Robbo is the reimplementation of a game released in the late eighties. This mean that the graphics is recreated as it was in the original game. The player mustn’t expect a renewed graphics, therefore any confrontation to 21st century games is out of line. By keeping this in mind, I judge the graphics delightful and worth its purpose.

Sound delight --> 2

At this stage of the development sound is almost non existent. It is possible to enable it but it must be done by changing parameters and recompiling the game. Instruction can be found in the help file.

Story enchantment --> 4

I give the game a 4 because there’s no story, not even a skeleton of a story in the game. The only thing the player can glimpse comes from the game design itself. You’re a robot, you’re somehow mazed and you must escape.

Bonus points --> 7

The game includes an editor that can be accessed by pressing Toggle Designer control. The editor allow the user to modify an existing level or create a new one from scratch.

OVERALL SCORE --> 6.5

For what concerns some important aspects the game is neat and worth to be played. Should the project in the future succeeded in including music and sound by default and just a draft of a story, GNU Robbo could really kick a**

Zombieland Rocks!

Yesterday night I finally managed to watch Zombieland.
After a dinner with pizza and beer I collapsed on the sofa and put the dvd on.
I already heard that the movie was good and I found it so. Zombieland it's one of those movies with no pretence of being an award winning film and that's probably one of the reasons why it's so enjoyable. I practically liked everything of Zombieland.
First the setting. I just love apocalyptic movies and this is set after the father of all the Zombie outbreaks.
Then the charcaters. The main character Columbus, a guy that reminds of one of Revenge of the Nerds, meets Tallahassee a kick ass Zombie Hunter and later the though-sexy-wild Wichita and her twelve years old sister Little Rock.
The movie is not only comic, fast and full of raging zombies but succeed in mixing these elements so well that it caught me from the beginning to the end without glitching.
The finale with the massive Zombie shooting in the theme Park is just epic.
There are rumors of a sequel. I hope they'll do it because I sure I want to see how the four keep on surviving when even the last Twinkies expired...