Star Trek Through the Ages

Series Inconsistencies Analysis

I’ve been a Star Trek fan for as long as I can remember... which goes back to at least the age of 3. One of my first memories is watching the live airing of a Star Trek The Next Generation (STTNG) episode in which a parasitic alien race, very much like the Goa’uld that come much later in Stargate, tries to take over Star Fleet.

I’ve religiously watched STTNG, Deep Space 9 (DS9), and Voyager through the years, and quit at that point with much animosity towards Enterprise and Star Trek: Nemesis.

Anyways, let’s get to the point of this post. I have recently started watching the 3 seasons of The Original Star Trek (TOS). My only impressions before this had been made up by seeing a random episode or two over the years, which screamed campiness to me. I can honestly now say though, after getting through a number of episodes, it’s still, after so many years, quite fun. And that’s saying something, as old stuff usually seems crappy unless you have nostalgia towards it.

The 2 things I respected most about STTNG and future co-spinoffs, for as long as they held it... was that they TRIED to maintain a proper continuity starting with STTNG. At the beginning, it was rare that they ever contradicted themselves, but as the legacy grew, the inconsistencies started becoming ridiculous. This has been my opinion for many years, and now that I am watching through TOS, I can finally see how bad it can really get (well, to be honest, I think Enterprise went way beyond anything in this regard, but I didn’t watch enough of it to talk about it in an informed manner. I will only talk about thing’s I’ve seen enough of to bash, and yes, I have gone through a lot of crap purposely for this reason...). It is actually quite good, however, that STTNG disregarded quite a bit of the original canon because it would have ruined the universe in a manner.

For example, in one of the first episodes of TOS, they traveled back in time by no special means other than pushing their engines faster than warp X. There was another early episode where they had fully functioning androids and the (slightly abused) machinery that created them (contradicting Data of STTNG). These are just two of many other “large” cans of worms they opened up by being too “open ended”. However, the producers made the right decision, IMO, and scrapped all the canon from TOS that they wanted and only made reference to it when they felt like it, starting the true canon of the Star Trek universe with Jean-Luk and his crew all the way through the end of DS9 and Voyager.

I am still very anxious to continue watching TOS but time has been very constrained lately and my multitasking abilities have diminished significantly over the years... a large part I’m sure from medications I take (such as for ADD or whatnot...).

On another random point about the Star Trek universe, while watching TOS, I found myself really enjoying the short costumes on all the female characters. I myself am quite the feminist, so this would usually go against my views, but for some reason, it fits real well and makes it more of a... shall I put it... fun/less serious atmosphere ^_^;. They tried to carry this legacy over to STTNG with Diana Troy in her “relatively skimpy” outfit(s), but they really did not do a good job of it. It just did not fit, at all. There was a specific episode were Picard is forced to leave the ship (to find some Romulan device that he has specific knowledge of due to a senior thesis or something), and another captain takes over. It raised my eyebrow when he harshly ordered Diana to put on a proper uniform, but he was completely right in doing so. I believe this might have been the producers/directors attempt at commenting on the issue.

The final thing I noticed that I wanted to comment on was just a little giggle for me. In the very first episode of TOS (with Shatner, not counting “The Cage” pilot with Pike) in which a crewman gains god-like powers, he creates/materializes a grave for Kirk, which reads “James R. Kirk” - which as we all know, Kirk was given the middle name of “Tiberius”, as he is often cited as “James T. Kirk” .... Just one of those minor continuity things that you wonder why they hadn’t caught it at the time... or maybe they decided to ignore it and still go with “Tiberius” as it is a pretty cool middle name.

Anyways, Star Trek (OST, STTNG, DS9, Voyager) & Star Gate (Seasons 1-7) are all very good stuff that do not date too badly on social issues. For anyone open to checking out new stuff who hasn’t tried watching either of these (is that possible that anyone hasn’t ever been exposed to at least one Star Trek series?), they are well worth it.

Welcome to Dakusan's Domain

A new beginning...

I figure near the beginning of this blog (which I will never call this section a blog beyond this point as it gives an inappropriate connotation for what I am trying to do with this site...), I should mention a little bit about myself and my personality. For starters, my name is Jeffrey Riaboy, and I’ve gone by the handle Dakusan for many many years. I’m currently a 25 year old male [I edit this one post and try to keep it up to date] who is mostly freelance, but I hold some steady contract jobs, none of which I can really talk about. I am a 100% self taught programmer/computer scientist/engineer, hacker/reverse engineer, computer repair expert, network engineer, server administrator, etc... [computer] nerd. I spend most of my life and time on computers, though I do get around socially with my small clique of friends :-). My 2 main purposes for this site are to inform people who wish to listen of my learning experiences and discoveries which I find worthy to share, and to get a good archive up of all my life’s work.

I will be trying to keep most of the posts here more towards a computer/technical nature, as I assume that is why anyone visiting this site would be here, but I always have a lot to talk about on other topics so there will be a lot of other stuff too, sorry ^_^;. These non-technical posts will much more frequent the beginnings of my archives so I can get them out of the way. I have a... rather large... backlog list of topics to talk about.

You will find out in the posts to come that I like to poke at things and complain about problems which should be fixed. I spend a large amount of my time making sure everything is working right for a great many people in many ways, and I wish other people would do the same for others and their projects. This is why I vent/rant. Sure, I could get involved in every [open source] project that I like and spearhead the things I see as weaknesses, but alas, there are only so many hours in a day.

You will also find I am quite blatant and honest to a T on anything I discuss. I take this personality quirk IRL to an extreme too, which often gets me in trouble :-).

I try to program as often as possible in C/C++. My favorite aspect of programming is optimization and getting things to work as fast and as best as they can. Unfortunately, a large part of programming [in the “real world”] is engineering the code so that anyone could jump in and work with it; so code layout/design and my personal syntax style are also large on the priority list these days.

I dabble in most all the other mainstream computer languages too. I highly subscribe to “the right tool for the job” philosophy. Which fortunately 99% of the time can keep me away from such travesties as .NET and Java! I work every now and then on “quickies” in VB and PHP. I also work a little too much in JavaScript and Flash (and PHP of course, but I enjoy it in a way), which have become necessities due to the web being such a large market these days.

One of my first big projects was my NES emulator, Hynes. Unfortunately, the emulation community at that time was full of a lot of strife (this was right after the UltraHLE release of 99). Due to my fear of my project being misused and released with a Trojan, I never really got into the open source community. (I now look back at that and wonder why I was so worried... of course, that was before the open source community was really mainstream too)... I am trying to remedy this though and am going back and fixing up all my old projects for release on the web as time permits, which unfortunately, means this will take a very long time :-).

Anyways, I think this pretty much lets you know what this site is for now, who I am, and what to expect. I hope I can keep you interested ^_^. Enjoy.

P.S. You might also notice, which can often be a bad thing, that when I write stuff, I type ALOT. Mostly because I talk online how I talk IRL... bleh.

P.P.S. You may have noticed a long gap between the first post and this one, and many subsequent ones. That is because after making the first post, I decided I needed to build up a real website to host everything, and make it a “big” project. So, further content was put on hold while I worked up everything needed for the launch, and life continued between other posts after that too :-).

GreaseMonkey, FireBug, and JavaScripting

Keeping up with the webmasters

A few days ago I threw together a script for a friend in GreaseMonkey (a FireFox extension) that removes the side banner from Demonoid. It was as follows (JavaScript).

This simple snippet is a useful example that is used for a lot of webpage operations. Most web page scripting just involves finding objects and then manipulating them and their parent objects. There are two common ways to get the reference to objects on a web page. One is document.getElementById, and another is through form objects in the DOM.
With the first getElementById, you can get any object by passing it’s id tag, for example,

<div id=example>
<script language=JavaScript>
	var MyObject=document.getElementById('example');
</script>

This function is used so often, many frameworks also abbreviate it with a function: I know of at least one framework that actually names the function as just a dollar sign $.

The second way is through the name tag on objects, which both the form and any of its form elements require. Only form elements like input, textarea, and select can use this.

<body>
	<form name=MyForm>
		<input type=text name=ExampleText value=Example>
	</form>
	<script language=JavaScript>
		document.MyForm.ExampleText.value='New Example'; //Must use format document.FormName.ObjectName
	</script>
</body>

This is the very basis of all JavaScript/web page (client side only) programming. The rest is just learning all the types of objects with their functions and properties.

So, anyways, yesterday, Demonoid changed their page so it no longer worked. All that needed to be done was change the 'navtower' to 'smn' because they renamed the object (and made it an IFrame). This kind of information is very easy to find and edit using a very nice and useful FireFox extension called FireBug. I have been using this for a while to develop web pages and do editing (for both designing and JavaScript coding) and highly recommend it.