Moved

I moved to seanja.com because I wanted more control and some space to play with so, update your links! (it only cost me 10$ for the whole year)

Online Polls

Online polls are never legitimate. Everyone knows it. So, when the Trent Arthur’s poll recently was ‘stuffed’ as they called it, the poll was taken down because it was being made more illegitimate. Can an online anonymous poll really be made more illegitimate? Apparently they thought so:

It would appear that someone has indeed resorted to stuffing the poll, namely the “No” option on the TCSA/NAMP poll, so I have taken it offline. I have no problem believing that more students are against the TCSA’s decision than are for it, that is not the issue, but instead the issues are of traffic irregularities and extreme improbabilities in voting patterns.

A poll being taken down due to extreme improbabilities in voting patterns defeats the purpose of having a poll. It does make sense however to remove the poll due to traffic irregularities along with the improbabilities. So now they are looking at new polling ‘software’ (the ‘ ‘ is because it is not really new software, it is just an extension for their blogging site). Currently they are looking at something that will need an email filled out to vote. That should stop the. No, wait, that probably wouldn’t work if the hackers really cared to stuff the polls. It is easy to generate something@something.com and drop it into a text box. It can be done in ruby in 1 line. Not that I condone doing it.

Polls should have the same securities that posting has, and more if they are to be legitimized. They should ask for the people who are voting to solve a captchca as well as tracking votes from ip addresses. While it is not impossible to hide your ip address, and it will make the voting less confidential, it would make it easier to figure out who is stacking the vote, or to limit the number of votes from an ip address.

It will never be possible to make it impossible for spammers and vote stuffers to do so. The point is to make it difficult for spammers and vote stuffers to mess with the system.

Star Wars Force Unleashed

The tech behind the game is amazing!

A King and a Friend

A King and a friend,
Slay’ed,
One in bed,
T’other as he fled,

For what?,
To become the despot,
Of the lands of Scot,
All for naught,

A prophecy,
Which was lucidly,
Taken in fallacy,
By the dame and He,

Two, insane,
A whisper campaign,
Attempts to destroy the thane,
Does but agitate his mane,

An unsightly irk,
By his close friend’s smirk,
His image a murk,
The seat its perk,

Here comes a sire,
The good Macduff and his hire,
Who fight fire with fire,
And exact their ire,

Suicide,
Of a poor maid,
Could cope with her trade,
Only with the blade,

The final strife,
Over a dead wife,
End of a life,
With the end of a knife,

Hams For Chanukah… wait a minute…

The don’t mess with it files 1

I was playing around with the settings in the CompizConfig Settings Manager today to see what was there. Who could resist all of the buttons? (Hint: Not me) Apparently I mucked something up pretty bad, because my cursor was disappearing randomly. It was still there, I could see it hovering over links and buttons, but it was invisible. Kind of annoying. So I decided that it was Compiz’ fault, and messed around with more settings (I think I changed this one before, maybe it should be this! No… the cursor is still disappearing crap…). Finally I decided to reset all of the settings to default and rebooted the computer (old habits die hard). That worked. So I started messing with the Compiz settings again. So far I still have a cursor. Maybe I should quit while I am ahead… (I think I may have just lost the mouse again)…

Anyway, here is some eyecandy for you mac fanboys/girls…

Albertan Apparently

Here is my reply to the article Out of Province Out of Luck in its entirety:

I have just been through the hassle of trying to get an OWSP job. I never thought of myself as an out of provincer having moved here from living in Holland for high school (that is four years of not living in Canada at all). I did move there from Alberta, but that was 7 years before I tried to apply for OSAP so that I could get a job on campus. I got a very short email that said:

“I was looking at Sean’s OSAP file and he is not eligible to apply for OSAP as he is a Alberta student. The work study program offered through OSAP is for Ontario residents only.”

How am I an Alberta student I wondered as I read the email… I have not lived there for 7 years… So I sent a short message back:

“I am an Ontario resident. I have lived in Ontario straight for the last two years.”

(I did go to Alberta for the first summer because I found a job at a refinery out there, good job if you can get it)

To which I got the reply:

“Have you lived in Ontario for at least 12 months in a row without being a full time student at a post-secondary school?”

Well, obviously not, because I wasn’t even living in Canada prior to that… it is in my record I am pretty sure. They must have access to that because they seem to ‘know’ that I am an Alberta student. Since I did not have a house in Alberta, and my parents were still living over seas for the first year that I was at Trent that means that I was not a resident of Canada by OSAP’s logic:

“That is what OSAP uses as a qualifier. If you live in Ontario for a year without going to school, you are contributing to Ontario and eligible to apply for OSAP.”

Apparently paying phone bills, utility bills, university bills, provincial sales tax (I should be exempt from that too seeing as I am an Albertan!), having an Ontario Health Card, living in Ontario, cut off from my parents by more than half of the country does not qualify me as an Ontarian let alone for the Ontario Work Study Program. What a crock… Maybe I should try applying through the TIP program.

Make yerself a stealth banjo!

Stealth Banjo

Make a little guitar into something useful, like a Banjo!
Everyone plays banjo! Humans are born with it!
Just strum the open strings of a banjo. That’s a G chord. All the other major chords are one finger straight across. Now you know 300 songs!
“Banjo” is the sound the banjo makes. Your thumb hits that funny high string and it’s magically never a wrong note. When you’re saying the word banjo, that’s a banjo song!
Any dog that wags a tail can play banjo too. Just put the banjo and the wagging tail together, and you’ve got a fine sound…

Setting the Ubuntu Default Resolution with Nvidia

This is mostly just a quick guide for me so that next time I do it, I don’t spend hours setting it up.

First things first, get your bookmarks:

Then get automatix2 and get your graphics card drivers:

That was their website

This is what you see after you install it:

(The driver is not listed because I already installed it)

This is restart time (so that the driver kicks in).

Should be able to get to here now:

Go through the menus and find where you set your resolution (you can play with the other stuff too if you want)

When you are done go to System -> Preferences -> Screen Resolution

Then open a terminal and enter sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and change the lines where you see:

Modes “1024×768″ “800×600″ “640×480″

to:

Modes “1680×1050″ “1024×768″ “800×600″

(where the first one is the resolution that you have in the default settings listing in your Screen Resolution Preferences window:)

Restart to make sure it worked: and voila, like magic you have just set your resolution to the one that you want! I am sure that this will help anyone out there who is new to Ubuntu (or any Debian based linux system)

Tell me that is not funny