It looks like it works well for in car use or when weight is not an issue.
I'd like to see a stripped down version that could be more readily used in model plane applications.
A guy I work with has stripped down an old Palm Pilot and is hacking it to process air speed data in order to adjust the flaps. I don't know how much a glider could carry. If you could have automated flight, GPS, images and some form of communications that would be such a cool toy.
What kind of plane are you planning on mounting this thing on? Is it going to be stripped down further?
How's this...
* Ask for validation on install.
* If validation fails then display a clear message stating that the software is pirated and may damage files on the computer.
It's best not to delete the files. That's way to obvious and they will often be restorable from backup. The best thing to do is to slowly corrupt data in the files. That way you can corrupt the backups too! It would be another software project in its own right to corrupt the data in such a way as to be most damaging without being immediately obvious.
Just a thought....I'm a philosopher as well as a software engineer.....I wouldn't necessarily condone this.
Thankfully I don't need to worry about this as my software has a big dongle.
It's best to leave your doors and windows open. That way poeple will assume that you've just popped out to the shops and could be back at any moment.
Yes I am from a different world.....:-)
Previous posters have pointed out the poverty divide in America....exactly the same thing applies to foreign policy as well. A lot of voters are too stupid to see this. Those in power are rich and evil.
Ok nerds, just in case you didn't know....
***** Girls like sex too! Good job that! *****
Not so many girls like porn....but they do like talking about sex.
Now most people prefer to talk about sex with people they know. But I'd prefer to talk about sex with strangers than talk policits.....so I'm all for your suggestion. American politics inevitably ends up with bombing. Proove me wrong.
Apparently the wildlife in the vicinity of Chernobyl has done very well. Wolf populations went right up.
Although many unviable mutations resulted in death, the population did very well because of reduced human activity....increased cancer rates are not so important for shorter life spans.
Would you rather live in New York or Chernobyl? Given the respective real estate markets I am very lucky to prefer Chernobyl. It's great being me.
People already look at America with pity and revulsion.
As a society you scare me shitless...(I know that there are lots of good minded people among you.)
China seems pretty scary too....but as yet they haven't demonstrated quite so much willingness to kill, torture and rape the rest of the world.
If there was a way of sending all the greedy people to Mars then we wouldn't need the nuclear power and so we wouldn't need to send the waste after them. Didn't Bush say something about wanting to go to Mars?
Compact yet solid.
Waterproof.
Vibration function...
Actually a temperature sensor coupled up to that vibration function would probably tip the balance to a superior product.
If you're bored with your job... go fishing...or post stupid comments to slashdot.
You've got your head so far up your arse you can't see how sunny it is. While you whinge about what materials your mouse is made from, people in Afghanistan get no choice about the materials used to make 'their' cluster bombs.
I know at least some google ads are paid for on a per click basis. Mind you the google ads are not (at the moment...wait 5 years) intrusive. Does anyone know any software that will download shit loads of advertising material while you are not using your network? It's important never to have to look at any of it.
Advertising in its current form should be illegal. It's particulary bad to advertise to children....I hear in some Scandinvavian countries they're no adverts on kids tv.
I really hate adverts. I left London a lot because I felt sick being dragged through all that conusmer bullshit everyday. (Now I live on a small Pacific Island....you can avoid most of the adverts.)
Ads are insiduous, creeping unwanted into your head. If I am forced in front of an advert I always take care to pay attention to the branding and think really bad things. An unadvertised alternative wins lots of points.
Has he had a decent coffee yet?
I can think of at least 3 cafes who roast better coffee than Starbucks in my area.
Bloody uniformity....why would you want the same bloody cafe all over the world. Ugh. Lets just level the whole bloody place with a bulldozer so we don't get any surprises. All I want is a Big Mac, KFC to go and a Frapaccino. I'd rather have shit on a stick.
Now maybe he is plotting the path of a really cool smart missile...yes that's a better way of thinking of it...Starbucks days are numbered! How long before he completes the trajectory.
Yeah I fully agree with you. I used to develop image processing applications for the Mac and ever since System 7 (prob before as well...but I'm not that old) there seemed to be a new OS update ever month or two. You found a good version and stuck to it until someone else had tried out a new version and didn't appear to be rebooting continuously.
Now that the online update thing is all in full swing there is no excuse for it.
It is annoying even if you've got ADC membership that gives you all the updates for whatever machines you want. Of course pre MacOS X a machine would really benefit from a Clean install every 120 hours of use or so which offset things a bit.
I used to love Apple. Then they sold me an iMac which supposedly included an iDisk and email account + webspace. A year later they bloody started asking for money. As if the machine hadn't cost enough in the first place. I think that was a real cheat.
Also the screen suffered from bouts of very annoying flickering.... I sent the thing back and it came back with a blue cast in one corner and red cast in the other. I ended up selling the dam thing.
Now while I still think there are some cool things about Apples I can't understand why people who use Apple's tend to be such fanatical drooling maniacs. I wouldn't be surprised if some of them were leaving their estates to Apple. Before MacOS X came out this was even less understandable - the technology was 10-15years behind - no preemptive threading, no protected memory. So we've arrived in the modern world but I won't be constrained by Apple's hardware ever again - there needs to be healthy competition.
Another thing that I hate about Apple is that Jobs is a total arse hole. What a shame he came back. He treats people like shit. He isn't a proper geek. The only thing he's good at is looking pretty and insisting NexT boxes are exactly square (hahaha.) How come Jobs is known so much better than Wozniak? - the man who really made Apple. Gates seems like a lot better person than Jobs from what I've seen. Everyone disses MS for stealing Mac UI ideas but remember that Jobs stole all those UI ideas from Xerox. In all other aspects of technology MS has been consistantly in front of Macs for years. Now they've released a version of BSD that you can only run on one architecture and you love them for it. Down with Jobs.
Couldn't you just wack the font size up? I use a 1600x1200 display on my laptop (prob about 15") and it looks great. Text that I am reading / editing I set to be a comfortable size to read and when you only need to refer to things occasionally you can keep the size nice and small.
User error looks like the problem here. I can't believe Apple / most apps won't let you change default font sizes. As long as the software can deal nicely with a range of font sizes I can't see how you can have a too high resolution.
I doubt that Microsoft needs more developers. Apparently there are 30,000 people working in Redmond. I don't know how many of these are developers but if you can't get it right with 30,000 I imagine adding more would just make things worse.
Probably what they need are fewer managers...I bet they are chasing each other around the campus with knives drawn and projects out.
The open source thing is a seperate issue. Already things like Rotor are available "open source" There are many benefits to open source other than having people contribute to your code (which could just be a hassle.)
FYI....
Most British Police don't even have gun licenses. Some British police form Armed Response Units. They obviously have guns but the only place they are publicly visible is airports. No British foot police patrol our cities with guns. The Armed Response Teams are trained for just that and I'm sure they don't leave weapons in their car which sounds really insecure.
Armed response teams used to set off from police stations as required. Nowadays I think there are armed response teams driving around the capital in vans. They don't come out of their vans unless an armed response is actually needed - they are just there to make the response quicker. Police in a regular patrol car won't have guns.
As far as I'm concerned there's no good reason for anyone to have a gun in town. Or a pistol anywhere.
I am British, lived there most of my life.
The chances of being mugged in London by someone with a gun are very remote. I'd say you weren't likely to be mugged with a firearm involved unless you had a lot of drugs.
My top tip for protecting your laptop on the tube always sit / stand with your leg going through the shoulder strap of the bag. (Obviously don't use the laptop on the train) A snatch and grab attempt is the most likely and this will foil that.
That's what I did when I lived in London. If somemone had pulled a knife on me I would have gone for the eyes, throat and genitals. One time when I really felt threatened I kept the power adapater for my Archos in my hand as it has quite a weight to back up the 3 pronged plugs with.
Thank God I don't live in London anymore. Now I live in NZ....I understand that until recently NZ had a higher gun ownership rate than the US.....but its real hard to get a pistol. There's no real trouble down here in NZ, especially in the South Island no one gets mugged. A lot of people don't bother locking their doors. I came to NZ straight from London and when I went tramping used to check my laptop into the bank for them to store in their vault. They always found this very funny. I used to be worried about the security of their vaults. (Staff would give me my laptop back because they recognised me - without asking for any ID....I'd have to wait while someone got the bag out with no physical barrier between me and the vault and no evident security).
Now I never worry about being mugged or anything like that. Also it only ever takes 10 minutes to get to work... any more than 5 cars is a traffic jam in Dunedin. Plus I don't need to worry about salary because my pay is so amusingly low. (I'm a software engineer) But it does cover a nice house and all the rest so what the hec!
I know this is slightly off topic but reading this article made me think it would be nice if people could clearly identify as part of their account
i) They are a Mac freak.
ii) They are a Windows freak.
iii) They are a Linux freak.
iv) They are just a freak.
Then you could easily filter out those people who weren't just freaks. I mean geeks.
Now I'm not a kernel expert so here are just my 2 cents - not the whole picture....
A particular source version of the kernel can build many different binary components. "Mainstream" distros like Suse ship kernels that have practically everything built as a module - a special library loaded by the kernel. Some of the source that is shipped with the kernel builds to modules that supports many different common hardware types.....some third parties also produce source / binary modules to support particular hardware (eg. Nvidia modules.)
Now there are many different places to get kernel sources....kernel.org is the horse's mouth....but there are many hackers out there shipping kernel sources with their own tweaks. Redhat kernel sources are not "standard"... they have been shipping sources which are 2.4 kernel with some of the 2.6 changes added. (This change is for performance reasons....but you can see how if the license allowed a distro could package source for some particular hardware into a set of kernel sources.)
Now a lot of people (like me - for some reason I wish I could explain!) like to torture themselves by building and tweaking their kernel until it is nice and small and supports all of their hardware but no more...a few years back you commonly had to rebuild your kernel to decently support your hardware - even with Redhat....now its mostly just done for the masochistic pleasure but there are also genuine, want to fit it on a floppy, want to install it on my washing machine reasons.
So the kernel isn't really the right place for hardware detection....the right place is ideally the thing that builds your kernel or decides which modules to load. It would be nice to have this as a standard package.
Kudzu is a Redhat thing....I don't know if you can get it working on another distro or how successfully. I'm pretty sure it doesn't compile source for missing modules in unconfigured hardware it finds.
The trouble with Redhat is that they splash their logo all over the place....it makes me feel quite sick. At least with gentoo bash looks like bash and kde looks like kde.
Yep there are so many groups of people who might want to attack the USA that its pretty scary that they need to plan on figuring out who it was that threw the nuke. America as a nation is without doubt the largest perpertrator of International Terrorism...please just look at the facts. Take a step back from this...the presumption is that America is going to be attacked again and when it does America will hit back....harder. Is this what you really want? This situation has been building up for many years now and its getting worse and worse, with more dangerous consequences. Humankind looks like its heading for a very dark period in history. I guess most/.ers are "Americans" and its a shame that this post gets only a 1.....the tone of the replies on the whole is very grim. We are all just people...don't let them manipulate you into being American. It's a very sick world. It's very annoying that it's so sick because of a very few people who will never be happy with the riches they possess because what they really want is everyone around them to have less. Is this a self-esteem problem?
Don't try to overturn their policies..Just explain to your manager why you need a cellphone if you can't budget for one yourself. Explain what could go wrong if you don't have access to one and suggest how long it would take to convert to an alternative system.
Keep you head down and your eyes up. You don't want to work for people like this but theres no point stressing or walking out of your job. Find a new job. Say goodbye and good luck.
Hear! Hear!
Couldn't agree with you more.
I used to share an experience of a story with other readers and now all these movie-goers polluted experience damages the idea of the story. I feel sorry for a lot of the kids who might otherwise have read the book.
Jackson has thrown dirt on something beautiful.
I'm sure I remember him saying something about having a resposibility to the book when he first started this project.
I wish he had got his own bloody story.
Braindead was good.
Red Faction comes with an easy to use map editor. It's a pretty light hearted game so I think you'll find it easer getting your maps running on servers.
You want to go to Levels4You - its a great community for mappers. Not just Red Faction.
We have a Red Faction map that models our office so at lunchtimes we can shoot the hell out of each other with out damaging the real walls.
There are a lot of fun home designed fun maps for counter strike - but most of the server activity is with old established maps and modifications of these maps. It's hard to get a good team balanced map.
Whatever map you design, for whatever game you'll have to play it a lot with other people before it's really well tuned.
Probably best of to start with a small map.
Wouldn't worry too much about all that CV, job adverts and portfollio stuff, just get the yellow pages and go knocking on doors. (I've been working 6 years now, did it more traditonally at first, but this is how I got my last job - much more interesting this way.) Your a graduate so the most important thing is that you're smart and enthusiastic. You got nothing to loose and remember your interviewing them as much as the other way round. Pretty big thing to give most of your time to someone for a few years. How about just getting a fishing rod and a tent?
Slashdot Mirror
It looks like it works well for in car use or when weight is not an issue.
I'd like to see a stripped down version that could be more readily used in model plane applications.
A guy I work with has stripped down an old Palm Pilot and is hacking it to process air speed data in order to adjust the flaps. I don't know how much a glider could carry. If you could have automated flight, GPS, images and some form of communications that would be such a cool toy.
What kind of plane are you planning on mounting this thing on? Is it going to be stripped down further?
The stuff in the link shows the principle
Damm....something removed the o's from my toos.
Obviously you can apply this idea to network traffic as well....
Oh no... my boss didn't need to know about tubgirl!
How's this...
* Ask for validation on install.
* If validation fails then display a clear message stating that the software is pirated and may damage files on the computer.
It's best not to delete the files. That's way to obvious and they will often be restorable from backup. The best thing to do is to slowly corrupt data in the files. That way you can corrupt the backups too! It would be another software project in its own right to corrupt the data in such a way as to be most damaging without being immediately obvious.
Just a thought....I'm a philosopher as well as a software engineer.....I wouldn't necessarily condone this.
Thankfully I don't need to worry about this as my software has a big dongle.
It's best to leave your doors and windows open. That way poeple will assume that you've just popped out to the shops and could be back at any moment.
Yes I am from a different world.....:-)
Previous posters have pointed out the poverty divide in America....exactly the same thing applies to foreign policy as well. A lot of voters are too stupid to see this. Those in power are rich and evil.
Ok nerds, just in case you didn't know....
***** Girls like sex too! Good job that! *****
Not so many girls like porn....but they do like talking about sex.
Now most people prefer to talk about sex with people they know. But I'd prefer to talk about sex with strangers than talk policits.....so I'm all for your suggestion. American politics inevitably ends up with bombing. Proove me wrong.
Apparently the wildlife in the vicinity of Chernobyl has done very well. Wolf populations went right up.
Although many unviable mutations resulted in death, the population did very well because of reduced human activity....increased cancer rates are not so important for shorter life spans.
Would you rather live in New York or Chernobyl? Given the respective real estate markets I am very lucky to prefer Chernobyl. It's great being me.
People already look at America with pity and revulsion.
As a society you scare me shitless...(I know that there are lots of good minded people among you.)
China seems pretty scary too....but as yet they haven't demonstrated quite so much willingness to kill, torture and rape the rest of the world.
If there was a way of sending all the greedy people to Mars then we wouldn't need the nuclear power and so we wouldn't need to send the waste after them. Didn't Bush say something about wanting to go to Mars?
Compact yet solid. Waterproof. Vibration function... Actually a temperature sensor coupled up to that vibration function would probably tip the balance to a superior product.
If you're bored with your job ... go fishing...or post stupid comments to slashdot.
You've got your head so far up your arse you can't see how sunny it is. While you whinge about what materials your mouse is made from, people in Afghanistan get no choice about the materials used to make 'their' cluster bombs.
Frizzin frazzin frekin
I know at least some google ads are paid for on a per click basis. Mind you the google ads are not (at the moment...wait 5 years) intrusive. Does anyone know any software that will download shit loads of advertising material while you are not using your network? It's important never to have to look at any of it.
Advertising in its current form should be illegal. It's particulary bad to advertise to children....I hear in some Scandinvavian countries they're no adverts on kids tv.
I really hate adverts. I left London a lot because I felt sick being dragged through all that conusmer bullshit everyday. (Now I live on a small Pacific Island....you can avoid most of the adverts.)
Ads are insiduous, creeping unwanted into your head. If I am forced in front of an advert I always take care to pay attention to the branding and think really bad things. An unadvertised alternative wins lots of points.
Has he had a decent coffee yet?
I can think of at least 3 cafes who roast better coffee than Starbucks in my area.
Bloody uniformity....why would you want the same bloody cafe all over the world. Ugh. Lets just level the whole bloody place with a bulldozer so we don't get any surprises. All I want is a Big Mac, KFC to go and a Frapaccino. I'd rather have shit on a stick.
Now maybe he is plotting the path of a really cool smart missile...yes that's a better way of thinking of it...Starbucks days are numbered! How long before he completes the trajectory.
Were you thinking of FinderPop?
Yeah I fully agree with you. I used to develop image processing applications for the Mac and ever since System 7 (prob before as well...but I'm not that old) there seemed to be a new OS update ever month or two. You found a good version and stuck to it until someone else had tried out a new version and didn't appear to be rebooting continuously.
.... I sent the thing back and it came back with a blue cast in one corner and red cast in the other. I ended up selling the dam thing.
Now that the online update thing is all in full swing there is no excuse for it.
It is annoying even if you've got ADC membership that gives you all the updates for whatever machines you want. Of course pre MacOS X a machine would really benefit from a Clean install every 120 hours of use or so which offset things a bit.
I used to love Apple. Then they sold me an iMac which supposedly included an iDisk and email account + webspace. A year later they bloody started asking for money. As if the machine hadn't cost enough in the first place. I think that was a real cheat.
Also the screen suffered from bouts of very annoying flickering
Now while I still think there are some cool things about Apples I can't understand why people who use Apple's tend to be such fanatical drooling maniacs. I wouldn't be surprised if some of them were leaving their estates to Apple. Before MacOS X came out this was even less understandable - the technology was 10-15years behind - no preemptive threading, no protected memory. So we've arrived in the modern world but I won't be constrained by Apple's hardware ever again - there needs to be healthy competition.
Another thing that I hate about Apple is that Jobs is a total arse hole. What a shame he came back. He treats people like shit. He isn't a proper geek. The only thing he's good at is looking pretty and insisting NexT boxes are exactly square (hahaha.) How come Jobs is known so much better than Wozniak? - the man who really made Apple. Gates seems like a lot better person than Jobs from what I've seen. Everyone disses MS for stealing Mac UI ideas but remember that Jobs stole all those UI ideas from Xerox. In all other aspects of technology MS has been consistantly in front of Macs for years. Now they've released a version of BSD that you can only run on one architecture and you love them for it. Down with Jobs.
Couldn't you just wack the font size up? I use a 1600x1200 display on my laptop (prob about 15") and it looks great. Text that I am reading / editing I set to be a comfortable size to read and when you only need to refer to things occasionally you can keep the size nice and small.
User error looks like the problem here. I can't believe Apple / most apps won't let you change default font sizes. As long as the software can deal nicely with a range of font sizes I can't see how you can have a too high resolution.
I doubt that Microsoft needs more developers. Apparently there are 30,000 people working in Redmond. I don't know how many of these are developers but if you can't get it right with 30,000 I imagine adding more would just make things worse.
Probably what they need are fewer managers...I bet they are chasing each other around the campus with knives drawn and projects out.
The open source thing is a seperate issue. Already things like Rotor are available "open source" There are many benefits to open source other than having people contribute to your code (which could just be a hassle.)
FYI....
Most British Police don't even have gun licenses. Some British police form Armed Response Units. They obviously have guns but the only place they are publicly visible is airports. No British foot police patrol our cities with guns. The Armed Response Teams are trained for just that and I'm sure they don't leave weapons in their car which sounds really insecure.
Armed response teams used to set off from police stations as required. Nowadays I think there are armed response teams driving around the capital in vans. They don't come out of their vans unless an armed response is actually needed - they are just there to make the response quicker. Police in a regular patrol car won't have guns.
As far as I'm concerned there's no good reason for anyone to have a gun in town. Or a pistol anywhere.
I am British, lived there most of my life.
The chances of being mugged in London by someone with a gun are very remote. I'd say you weren't likely to be mugged with a firearm involved unless you had a lot of drugs.
... any more than 5 cars is a traffic jam in Dunedin. Plus I don't need to worry about salary because my pay is so amusingly low. (I'm a software engineer) But it does cover a nice house and all the rest so what the hec!
My top tip for protecting your laptop on the tube always sit / stand with your leg going through the shoulder strap of the bag. (Obviously don't use the laptop on the train) A snatch and grab attempt is the most likely and this will foil that.
That's what I did when I lived in London. If somemone had pulled a knife on me I would have gone for the eyes, throat and genitals. One time when I really felt threatened I kept the power adapater for my Archos in my hand as it has quite a weight to back up the 3 pronged plugs with.
Thank God I don't live in London anymore. Now I live in NZ....I understand that until recently NZ had a higher gun ownership rate than the US.....but its real hard to get a pistol. There's no real trouble down here in NZ, especially in the South Island no one gets mugged. A lot of people don't bother locking their doors. I came to NZ straight from London and when I went tramping used to check my laptop into the bank for them to store in their vault. They always found this very funny. I used to be worried about the security of their vaults. (Staff would give me my laptop back because they recognised me - without asking for any ID....I'd have to wait while someone got the bag out with no physical barrier between me and the vault and no evident security).
Now I never worry about being mugged or anything like that. Also it only ever takes 10 minutes to get to work
Cheers
Stewart
(Never lend anyone your Boat, Gun or Chainsaw)
I know this is slightly off topic but reading this article made me think it would be nice if people could clearly identify as part of their account i) They are a Mac freak. ii) They are a Windows freak. iii) They are a Linux freak. iv) They are just a freak. Then you could easily filter out those people who weren't just freaks. I mean geeks.
Now I'm not a kernel expert so here are just my 2 cents - not the whole picture....
... they have been shipping sources which are 2.4 kernel with some of the 2.6 changes added. (This change is for performance reasons....but you can see how if the license allowed a distro could package source for some particular hardware into a set of kernel sources.)
A particular source version of the kernel can build many different binary components. "Mainstream" distros like Suse ship kernels that have practically everything built as a module - a special library loaded by the kernel. Some of the source that is shipped with the kernel builds to modules that supports many different common hardware types.....some third parties also produce source / binary modules to support particular hardware (eg. Nvidia modules.)
Now there are many different places to get kernel sources....kernel.org is the horse's mouth....but there are many hackers out there shipping kernel sources with their own tweaks. Redhat kernel sources are not "standard"
Now a lot of people (like me - for some reason I wish I could explain!) like to torture themselves by building and tweaking their kernel until it is nice and small and supports all of their hardware but no more...a few years back you commonly had to rebuild your kernel to decently support your hardware - even with Redhat....now its mostly just done for the masochistic pleasure but there are also genuine, want to fit it on a floppy, want to install it on my washing machine reasons.
So the kernel isn't really the right place for hardware detection....the right place is ideally the thing that builds your kernel or decides which modules to load. It would be nice to have this as a standard package.
Kudzu is a Redhat thing....I don't know if you can get it working on another distro or how successfully. I'm pretty sure it doesn't compile source for missing modules in unconfigured hardware it finds.
The trouble with Redhat is that they splash their logo all over the place....it makes me feel quite sick. At least with gentoo bash looks like bash and kde looks like kde.
Step 1: Devise a reliable method of getting vehicles to the planet.
Step 2: Underpants.
Step 3: Terraform the planet.
Gnomes.
Yep there are so many groups of people who might want to attack the USA that its pretty scary that they need to plan on figuring out who it was that threw the nuke. America as a nation is without doubt the largest perpertrator of International Terrorism...please just look at the facts. /.ers are "Americans" and its a shame that this post gets only a 1.....the tone of the replies on the whole is very grim. We are all just people...don't let them manipulate you into being American.
Take a step back from this...the presumption is that America is going to be attacked again and when it does America will hit back....harder. Is this what you really want? This situation has been building up for many years now and its getting worse and worse, with more dangerous consequences. Humankind looks like its heading for a very dark period in history.
I guess most
It's a very sick world. It's very annoying that it's so sick because of a very few people who will never be happy with the riches they possess because what they really want is everyone around them to have less. Is this a self-esteem problem?
Don't try to overturn their policies..Just explain to your manager why you need a cellphone if you can't budget for one yourself. Explain what could go wrong if you don't have access to one and suggest how long it would take to convert to an alternative system.
Keep you head down and your eyes up. You don't want to work for people like this but theres no point stressing or walking out of your job. Find a new job. Say goodbye and good luck.
Hear! Hear! Couldn't agree with you more. I used to share an experience of a story with other readers and now all these movie-goers polluted experience damages the idea of the story. I feel sorry for a lot of the kids who might otherwise have read the book. Jackson has thrown dirt on something beautiful. I'm sure I remember him saying something about having a resposibility to the book when he first started this project. I wish he had got his own bloody story. Braindead was good.
Red Faction comes with an easy to use map editor. It's a pretty light hearted game so I think you'll find it easer getting your maps running on servers. You want to go to Levels4You - its a great community for mappers. Not just Red Faction.
We have a Red Faction map that models our office so at lunchtimes we can shoot the hell out of each other with out damaging the real walls.
There are a lot of fun home designed fun maps for counter strike - but most of the server activity is with old established maps and modifications of these maps. It's hard to get a good team balanced map.
Whatever map you design, for whatever game you'll have to play it a lot with other people before it's really well tuned. Probably best of to start with a small map.
Wouldn't worry too much about all that CV, job adverts and portfollio stuff, just get the yellow pages and go knocking on doors. (I've been working 6 years now, did it more traditonally at first, but this is how I got my last job - much more interesting this way.) Your a graduate so the most important thing is that you're smart and enthusiastic. You got nothing to loose and remember your interviewing them as much as the other way round. Pretty big thing to give most of your time to someone for a few years. How about just getting a fishing rod and a tent?