Someone in #lh today told me about Sender Policy Framework, which sounds like a badly-needed enhancement to the Internet’s email protocols. Basically, the idea is to provide a DNS record that informs MTAs “don’t trust emails claiming to be from this domain unless they’re coming from one of my actual servers".

In DNS, this looks like (in my case):

emptymatter.org. IN TXT "v=spf1 a mx ~all"

Some MTAs support SPF but need to be configured, I believe Gentoo’s postfix is one of them. If I’m going to expect other mail servers to support it, I probably should myself. I’ll have to tackle that another day…

Nothing exciting here. Got my tax refunds. Might build a home-made NAS with a couple terabytes of disk and put it in the basement.

On the DS, I’ve been playing Rondo of Swords and The World Ends With You. Rondo is a pleasant find, a difficult but still reasonable strategy RPG that makes one think and plan ahead, unlike games such as Revenant Wings which are much more “bring a healer and just mob everyone at the thing they’re strong against!” Also, I have a crush on Atlus by this point. There’s no denying it now. I draw their name with little hearts all around when I’m in meetings.

The World Ends With You is refreshingly original, one of those games that, even with it being Square Enix, is a bit surprising that it made it to the States. Very Japanese, and the game makes few concessions to the English audience. Sure, long gone are the times of gratitutous name changes, but even the j-pop/j-rock soundtrack remains intact, and that is, to my slightly jaded mind, a bit commendable. Now, if only the main character didn’t suffer from two vile Square Enix staples: unimaginable thinness and nearly sickening teenage angst. Neku is supposed to get better with the latter; I hope it is soon.

My games to beat are now Etrian Odyssey and Rondo of Swords, one I must beat before Etrian Odyssey II (guess which one) is released here, and the other before the Final Fantasy IV remake reaches the States. I’m excited. If I have time before those, Final Fantasy III and The World Ends With You are my RPGs to beat. FF3 is a cakewalk thus far, but its ease and its crude mechanics compared to Final Fantasy V make it hard to stay with for long.

I didn’t really intend this to become all about video games. I’ve been working on a Gentoo Wiki page for the HP 2133 which has kind of slowed down as most of the parts I’m interested in are supported as best they can be without new versions of drivers, I think. There’s some other hardware that I need to try out (the webcam, for example), but I don’t really care that much, so it’s low priority. Notebooky stuff works.

I have a Waterfield Designs bag coming soon, which I’m excited about. Don’t think it will be suitable for gaming books, but I still have that backpack which is going on 5+ years. The little trooper.

I’ve been meaning to survey the gaming group and associated friends to see what they’re using for IM these days. I think the answer for some is “nothing", with a couple saying “AIM on occasion” or “I idle on Google Talk", so I’ve not really been motivated to test those waters. I want to get a private Jabber conference room running for the group, since the IRC thing kind of sputtered off and died (I still idle there!), but I know it means getting people to switch to Jabber (or at least Google Talk) and then getting them to use a non-Google Talk client (Pidgin, I bet, but maybe Trillian would work). Sigh. If anyone has interest in switching to one network (I highly suggest a Jabber-like ["XMPP” for the techies]), or trying out conferences, or whatever, email/IM me and we’ll play around.

This really is getting rambly, and people might expect me to write long posts all the time. So I’m wrapping this up by saying that spring is finally here, and that’s why it snowed yesterday.

• Went bowling with the Rutzes and, for expediency, let’s call them the Schucks. I wish I wasn’t so rusty. I did have one decent game though.
• On the subject of Rock Band, Appetite For Destruction would be an awesome full album for them to sell in their music store.
• On the subject of games, Rondo of Swords is pretty interesting. Hard, too, but I like the “Route Maneuver System". Adds a nice amount of tactics to the game. Atlus is easily my favorite DS publisher. And it has Izuna, apparently!
• Work destroyed me this week, but I had fun.

I always seem to update my blog in bursts. So, while I suggest that no one get hasty and expect large posts the next couple days, I thought I would mention a little something to keep me from feeling totally neglectful.

I bought a HP 2133 ("Mini-note") to play with, the middle configuration with SuSE, to be exact. So that should be exciting. Won’t be here for another couple weeks, though. :( The plan is to use it as essentially a quick companion for work and such, with enough of a desktop environment to get work done and/or SSH into my various sites of interest. The MacBook is still around, too, for any hypothetical bigger or more involved tasks. Not that the HP 2133 is a toy, but a lot of it is about playing around and being a bit less tied to my desktop.

Looking forward to when it gets here, since it would seem that it will also become a minor task to get everything supported in Gentoo… looks like I get to contribute to another page on the Gentoo wiki.

I was going to go off on another aural association story, but I decided at the last minute to instead point you, the reader, to one of my all-time favorite essays, by none other than Neal Stephenson, In the Beginning…was the Command Line.

All of those who think I’m a bit — ahem — snobbish in my choice of technology would do good to give it a read. A bit dated, yes, but it does a good job of explaining where I, personally, am coming from when I look down my nose at certain operating systems/software/social networking whooey websites/etc.

And for those already fully familiar with my biases, or those having similar biases of their own, if you haven’t read In the Beginning…, it’s really worth it.

I decided to play Still Alive in Rock Band to blow off some steam today, and after beating it on hard guitar, beating it on expert guitar, beating it on medium vocals, and beating it on hard vocals, I knew I was on a roll.

What followed was one and a half hours of slogging my way through the expert guitar solo tour. Didn’t do the greatest (but never did fail), and this is probably nothing special to some readers, but I’m excited. Suffragette City was my old obstacle, and it has been hurdled, for now, until it comes up again in band play. I finished out two cities and parts of a third before I had to stop. Where did I end off?

Enter God-Damned Sandman.

I’m going to need a dark pact to get through it, I am certain. I am already preparing the necessary sacrifices to some foul demon necessary to grace my left hand with enough metal to make it through. But, oh, what a night of unholy glory it will be when that song is a notch on my belt.

Anyway, Still Alive is loads of fun. Everyone (all three) here knows the song and just mentioning it invokes humming and singing and dry, informative recitals. Will be great when four are over for full band play.

The great thing about the song, I decided on my way to lunch today, is how beautifully Portal it is. Sure, the song is funny on its surface, but after playing the game, the song becomes a deep underground complex of dark humor. The entire game is brilliantly executed in the humor department, and after going through GLaDOS’ insincere banter and bloodthirsty pleading, the context of Still Alive becomes a deep black — the empty motivation in the people who are still alive especially. A perfect ominous closing.

And then it’s still a funny song.