Waxing Nostalgic

As should be obvious from the comments I've made, I read Slashdot religiously. I don't agree with all (or even a lot) of the editorialising that goes on in the articles, but it does give you a quick overview of what's going on in the computer industry.

Anyways, getting on topic here: Got in at 'work' this morning and dropped off the ethics application (which due to complications hadn't made it in last week) and then took a quick glance at Slashdot before settling down to figure out where I had left off almost two weeks ago.

Getting back to work quickly wasn't to be.

There before my eyes was a story with the Be logo. This was not a Be logo with a black mourning band in the top corner. No, this was a Be logo that was unmarred by such blemishes. This was a Be logo that accompanied the news that yellowTAB was announcing that new machines were going to ship with Zeta, their next-gen implementation of BeOS, pre-installed.

My heart soared, I could hear choirs of angels singing hallelujahs in the background. Oh wait, Europe only. Ah well, I couldn't afford a new computer anyways.

Either way, the article awakened in me a yearning, a burning desire, a longing to reinstall BeOS once again. That too was not to be, mainly due to a lack of hard drives and a decent CPU to run it on. Despite that, I still want to install BeOS. I used it for the better part of a year, only swapping back to Windows/Linux/BSD/whatever-my-OS-du-jour-was to do some Java coding from time to time.

I used it and I loved it.

Out of all the OSes I've installed (and trust me, that's a lot) BeOS was my favourite. It was small, fast, stable in the days when a PII was still top of the line. The GUI was clean (although it hasn't aged well), it was easy to use, and it scaled remarkably well. If the apps I had needed had still been available and the hardware support still there I probably would still be using it. That and a decent web browser, because, let's face it, NetPositive was barely HTML 3.x compliant.

Sure there were problems: No multi-user support, updates that occasionally broke drivers (5.0.3 broke support for my Epson printer), and a company whose eventual fate was to have their assests sold of to a PDA maker. But despite its faults I still loved it.

Granted, Zeta isn't likely to do much save sate the faithful (and even then some items, like the removing of the sliding tabs, may anger them). The app support is still sub-par despite a nice selection of stuff over on BeBits, and there's still no Java. But hey, at the very it comes with Firebird pre-installed.

Christ, it sounds like I was talking about an ex-girlfriend or something. Further proof that I've spent too much time attatched to a keyboard.

Damn You ImageMagick!

I had an idea a while back and I've been trying to do stuff with dynamically generated images (which are in reality a composite of other images) using ImageMagick. I think I've got the perl code down pat to use Image::Magick (aka PerlMagick) to do what I want it to do, there's only one problem.

It doesn't work.

I shouldn't be doing anything wrong, in fact I even copied some of the code directly out of the ImageMagick documentation. Yet every single time I try to write to a file I get a segmentation fault. No other info than that, just 'Segmentation Fault'. Ok, I didn't really want to write to a file anyways, I'll write to STDOUT instead. Nope, can't do that because any images produced have errors and therefore can't be sent to a web browser.

To make things even more fun, if I redirect the output from STDOUT to a file using > I can sometimes view the resultant image in a web browser. There doesn't seem to be any logic to when it does this, it just does.

This is getting really irritating.

PerlMagick does exist as a package in the Debian archives…but the package depends on the perlapi package which disappeared when perl was moved from 5.6 to 5.8. Oops. Looks like it's time to try dpkg -i --force-depends and hope for the best, that is after I clean up all the files that make uninstall fails remove.

On another note entirely: This image caused me to make a 'what the hell?' face, followed by uncontrolled laughing. It's just odd but amusingly great at the same time.

Update: The webserver is now a horrible mismash of packages from stable, testing, and unstable, but everything seems to be working as long as I don't mind the fact that apt-get complains about unmet dependencies.

Update 2: It works! It works! It works!

Try it out!

Yes, this is the idea I mentioned in the fridge poetry section. No, I don't plan on using it, I did it for the hell of it. If Nancy wants the script to do this she's free to have it rather than take pictures of the fridge.

What I Learnt On My  Summer  Autumn Vacation

By Andrew G., Age 22

• Cheesecake tastes good even if it's your first time making it.
• Additionally, since cheesecake isn't that hard to make, it's expensive to buy ingredients for.
• Corn starch makes stuff thick fast.
• Custard requires a special touch to make correctly, and I don't have it.
• One Athlon Thunderbird gives off more heat than one PPC 604e, one Celeron, and two SuperSPARCs combined.
• My freezer can fit a lot more food than I thought.
• There's only so many games of Space Trader you can play in one week.
• Packing a hard drive for shipping so that you don't void the warranty is harder than you think.
• Having nothing to do in Moncton is just as boring as having nothing to do in Frdericton.
• It takes less than a week for my mother to start nagging me about something.
• Free food doesn't make nagging bearable.
• The Chapters in Moncton is much better than the one in Fredericton.
• They still don't have a copy of Good Omens though.
• Even given that, I can't walk into a Chapters without spending some money.

Roadrunner, Roadrunner. Going Faster Miles An Hour.

A quick background to this rambling: At about 1 PM I received an email from UNB telling me I had until 4:30 to sign a form allowing me to opt-out of the student health plan. At about 2 I managed to find out that it would be all irght if I grabbed one of the parents' cars and headed out to Fredericton. Besides, there was an apartment I had called about that I wanted to check out.

Now normally it wouldn't take me that long to get to Fredericton. Nice divided highway that you can normally do 125 on without the police bothering you. As it was, I had to go to Sussex and swap cars with my father and then head to Fredericton along part of the Coles Island (speedlimit of 90) road with a lengthy looping detour at the start.

Either way, I arrived in Fredericton at 4:30 and managed to sign the papers just before the office closed. I then spent an hour and a half trying to track down my potential room mate and the person renting the apartment before finally finding out it had just been rented. This was at 6PM, which meant it was now time to head back to Moncton. This is where we hit the point of this:

I didn't want to go back to Moncton.

Mind you, I didn't want to stay in Fredericton either. I didn't mind the fact I had an hour and a half drive ahead of me, I just didn't feel like going back to Moncton or staying in Fredericton.

What I really wanted to do is hop in the car, turn the stereo up loud, and drive as fast as I could to nowhere in particular. Just to head nowhere until the scenery became one blur of trees and the the roar of the engine and rumble of the tires had faded into the background noises I ignored. Instead I headed home, singing loudly (and likely offkey) with whatever song happened to be playing.

Where ever I am is not where I want to be.

First The Lights, Then The Collar Goes Up

A while back I listed the purchases I had made at Chapters. Seeing as there's not a hell of a lot to do in Moncton anymore I've been attacking that pile (and others) this week.

Current status:

• 1066 and All That
• Coraline
• Watership Down
• Through The Looking Glass
• The Long Goodbye
• Heart of Darkness & The Secret Sharer
• Don Quixote
• Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan
• The Great Gatsby
• Ender's Game
• Neverwhere
• Life of Pi
• Stardust

As the sidebar and above list proves, I'm still tackling Hirohito & The Making Of Modern Japan. It's an interesting book, the only problem is that right now I'm still stuck in "the prince's education." While I'm sure it is important in showing just what kind of society he grew up in and how it shaped his character, it just leaves you wanting to know more about the people who appear only in passing rather than the prince-regent himself. However, I should make some decent progress for a change, especially seeing as it's now the only book I brought home with me that's yet unread.

As for the others I've finished, I'd have to say my least favourite was Neverwhere. There was just something about it that didn't quite sit right with me. Maybe it was the story itself, or the fact that I found that some of the plot twists in it also appeared in some form in American Gods, but the end result was that I found it enjoyable but not enthralling.

Peter was right about one thing though, Life of Pi is good. Amazingly good. Superbly good. Words can not begin to express how much I enjoyed it good. Out of all the books I've finished so far it's without a doubt my favourite of the lot. I can't explain why I liked it, there's just something there that makes you want to finish it despite the fact that you already know what the protaganist's final fate is.

Finally, while I'm at it, Ender's Game. I'll start by getting one thing out of the way: I enjoyed it. I want to track down and read the sequels (and I really hope they don't deteriorate in quality as quickly as another science fiction classic I once read that made me want to read the sequels.) But, and you should have seen the but comingI just don't see what all the hype about it is. Yes, it was good. But I didn't find it to be that good.

Maybe it's because I had heard so much before, maybe it's because I had worked out many of the plot twists beforehand rather than just letting my mind flow along with the story. But I just don't get what's so amazing.

Anyone care to explain?

Beans

It looks like I spoke too soon about getting good food while I was home. I now understand what my sister used to complain about when she visited.

The fridge is full of condiments. If you wanted to make something there's at least three different kinds of mustard, just don't expect anything you can use for filling.

As for the cupboards… Well, there's beans. Lots of beans. Tons of beans. An entire shelf of canned goods that seems to be made up entirely of beans. We've got yellow beans, green beans, lima beans, white beans, kidney beans, baked beans (in tomato sauce, molasses, or barbeque sauce), more beans than anyone can ever imagine using. All represented by at least 2 cans, often with radically different labels — meaning that one was bought years after the other because someone might need another can of something that was never used.

Moving away from food, this computer is unbelievable — and I don't mean that in a good way. Miranda acts odd on it, Winzip has been installed so long that the 'days used/archives opened' counter seems to have reset itself and is telling me it's only been installed for 22 days (despite the fact that the folder it's installed in was created 4 years ago…). The browsers available are Internet Explorer 5.5 and Netscape 3.02 Gold. That's right, a version of Netscape that predates Internet Explorer 3.

It was good for one thing though; I found out that my site looks absolutely horrible in IE 5.5. The spacings are all off, the colours don't match. In short, it looks even more like a page designed by someone who as no idea what they're doing than normal. In fact, about the only Movable Type page that looks right is Peter's, and that's likely due to the lack of borders. It would appear I have something to keep me occupied this week anyways.

Depart Then, Impious One. Depart, Accursed One. Depart With All Your Deceits

For the past couple of days on Slashdot there's been debate related to Verisign's site finder technology. (See stories from: Sept. 11, Sept. 15,  Sept. 17, Sept. 19, Sept. 20) For those who are unaware of what it does and are too lazy to click the links, essentially what's happened is that they've added a wild card to the root DNS servers for .com, and .net TLDs. Whenever you make a search that doesn't match any entry in their servers it returns an address of 64.94.110.11 – or sitefinder.verisign.com. Essentially like the feature in Internet Explorer that searches for mistyped URLs using MSN, except that you can't turn it off.

Anyways, getting to the point here. I had my first encounter with it tonight when I was attempting to access the website of a former employer to find out whether they gave the address of their New Brunswick offices as being in Sussex or Pennobsquis. I missed the 'a' and ended up with potshcorp.com.

My first clue that something was wrong came when Firebird popped up a window asking me if I wanted to let verisign.com set a cookie. Wait a minute here…cookie? Verisign? I shouldn't be getting any of those. Next thing I know I'm treated to a blue and white webpage with a search box across the top and a list of 'corrected' URLs for me to try.  The fact that I'm posting this with a passage from the Roman Ritual as the title should be a clue as to how I felt about these developments.

To make things even better, not one of the domains that were suggested (www.ots-corp.com, www.otscorp.com, www.hcorp.com, and www.tothcorp.com) were the right one. It makes me think that their algorithm might need a little work. I mean www.hcorp.com? Yes, because I accidentally entered four extra characters without somehow noticing it.

A solution quickly presented itself though; I just nipped into my bind config files and made a few keystrokes. Presto! I was now authoritative for *.verisign.com¹ for all machines that used my server to resolve addresses. It gave me a nice warm and rosy feeling inside. Really it did.

¹ I did later relent and I'm now only authoritative for sitefinder.verisign.com. I'm not planning on ever wanting to visit a Verisign website, but it still could happen.

Vacation Time

It's about a month later than Jo wanted me to take it, but now that the papers are all ready and submitted to the Ethics Review Board I'm taking a week off and heading home.

Mmmmm… Meals cooked by someone who's actually competent.

Needless to say I probably won't be posting while I'm gone – largely due to the fact that the only Internet access I'll have will be through a Pentium 150 that's running the same install of Windows 95 as when I started my Bachelor's.

Boring Friday Night Updates

Sometimes the captions to these things just write themselves.

Fuck.

Funding:							 $3400
Tuition (Approx):						($1700)
Rent (4 Months):						($2200)
Net Income (before groceries, phone, &c.):			($ 500)

I think the above table does a fairly good job of summarising my current situation. There may be some more funding coming for me, but it's unlikely to do much more than cover rent and groceries. As for jobs available through the CS deprtment, well, I didn't get any of the ones I had applied for and there's no more that have positions available.

Needless to say, if I can't make my rent, I definitely can't pay for Internet. Therefore this site will be going down by the end of the month barring any sudden miracles. It's been short but fun.

Update: Speaking of sudden miracles, the school of graduate studies is now giving me a little extra funding for this term only. I'll be able to cover my rent and hopefully groceries, but I'm still going to have to take this site down.

1000? 1024?

As anyone who reads Slashdot has probably seen by now, a group of computer users are suing a collection of computer companies for deceptive advertising.

The problem? They're advertising hard drives where one gigabyte is 10⁹ bytes, and not 2³⁰. (The story is here.)

Now, besides the fact that I think there's better things they could do with their time, I'm really torn on this one. On one hand, I can see where their confusion comes from. RAM is measured in the 2¹⁰ = 1 K system, but there's a really good reason for that. When you're building circuits for a binary system, it's a lot easier to build storage in powers of two than it is to build in powers of ten.

Now, I can see where they're getting the idea that 1 GB has to equal 1024 MB from. But at the same time 1 Giga = 1000 Mega is a SI standard. When you deal with anything else (even network transmission speeds) you're dealing in base 10.

So who's wrong here? The vendors for using base 2 prefixes in combination with base 10? Or the consumers who expect 1 M in computer terms to mean 1024 K?^*

I'd go on but I can't even seem to form a coherent rant tonight. To come to the point I was trying to reach: 1 GB = 1000 MB, 1 GiB = 1000 MiB. Sure, the latter isn't a SI standard, but it's a lot easier than trying to explain to someone that their hard drive uses base 10, their network is measured using base 10, and their RAM is measured using base 2.

That's it, I'm going back to bed.

^* To take this to the extreme, I've seen someone who thought that a 3 GHz processor meant 3072 MHz. This is of course the exception, rather than the rule (I hope…), but it still makes me want to scream "No! That's wrong! Stop doing that! Stop it!"

While I'm swiping links from Slashdot, I may as well mention that I want one of these. If someone's willing to cough up the 100 Euros for me, I'll gladly dig my Commodore out of storage.

Gettin' Off Me Lazy Arse

I finally figured that I should put this up here. After all, stuff like this was the original reason I was putting up this website. Well, that and having a place to post pictures to that I could link to remotely.

So, here it is then. The first official release of my client for the uptimes project (which is really just a highly modified version of version 1.0 of Alejandro Gramajo's Uptimes-Chaos, but I digress.)

Anyways, I've been messing with it off and on for what's probably close to a year now, and here it is: Chaos-Control 0.1alpha*

(Yes, alpha. I haven't had a chance to test some of the stuff on it.)

What does it support? Well, right now only Linux since I need other test boxes to try out other clients. Solaris and GNU/Hurd support are in the works (as I do have access to those.)

It also supports multiple uptimes servers via the conf file (of course, the only other uptimes project I know of went down, so not that that's really important anymore…) as well as 'long' CPU info on Linux machines, something which Uptimes-Chaos didn't support when I started modifying it. (And which it might still not support. I haven't looked at his code since I first got it.)

Well, that's probably the most disorganised release ever, and I think it's normal to hype the program a bit more, but it's there. I should do up a page for these type of things someday.

Side note: It's known to work fine on x86, SPARC, PPC, and m68k CPUs. Anything else may or may not work correctly.

This Entry Brought To You By Whingeing and Complaining

Ugh. What a week it's been so far.

For starters, I'm still no closer to getting my ethics situation resolved, which is important considering I need to have it in if I'm going to take next week off. I really should thank Jo for the amount of work she's done in helping me get that ready.

Keeping with the thesis for a moment, I've got lovely hardware/software issues going on. Namely I have a program that listens for a TCP connection, does stuff when it gets one, and when the connection is closed starts listening for another one. Sounds fairly simple, right? Well, it would be, except that it only seems to want to work if both the program that's listening and the program that's connecting are on the same machine.

If I put them on two different machines (as is required by the current experiment design) then the listening one will claim to be listening after the connection gets closed but never accept any connections. Likewise, the one that's connecting will claim to have made the connection, but you'll never see the results of it. What I wouldn't give for a nice little off by one bug instead.

And finally, I'm sick yet again. Even Jo's been making comments about the amount of time I spend sick. Thankfully I have my drugs to try and get rid of it, but strep throat still feels like having the flu plus the added bonus of having some gent shove a screwdriver in your ear whilst sanding your tonsils.

That's it, no more bitching from me. I'm going back to bed.

I Must Be Crazy

"Just say NO to drugs, and perhaps you won't end up like the Hurd people." – Linus Torvalds.

I think the title says it all, I must be crazy. What else would give me the sudden urge to take one of the old 586s (586es?) I have lying around and attempt to install what has got to be the most infamous of all free software projects on it.

Not a clue what I'm going to do with the thing. Hell, not even a clue of what I can do with the thing. But I've got the hardware, I've got the CDs, and my landlord still hasn't complained about my power usage^*, so I'm going to try it anyways.

If anyone happens to stop by and finds me curled up in a fœtal position mumbling nonsense, they'll know why.

^* Then again, the previous tenant had a stereo system that idled at roughly the same wattage as all my computers combined. So I'm probably using next to nothing compared to him.

Brought To You By The Letters 'V' & 'I'

Oh joy. Oh glee. Oh most rapturous of moments, incapable of being contained within the bounds of prose that man has created.

All right, so I'm laying on the sarcasm a bit thick, even given my usual standards. But hey, I'm currently entering this posting via lynx, I think it warrants a little extra something. So why am I posting this via lynx? Well, I went poking around on Maxtor's website, in the hopes of resolving the problem known as the "odd and loud hard drive noises that will be promptly followed by a screen coloured in everyone's favourite shade of blue" and found out that before they will even consider your drive for replacement you need to run a fairly comprehensive series of tests on it.

So, 5 floppy disks later, I finally managed to write the program to the disk, rebooted, and that's where I am now. Sitting in front of a monitor. Watching my Athlon run a series of DOS-based diagnostics that have so far turned up nothing. Logged into my webserver, typing an entry. Using vi. (Lynx got a bit too much, so I was forced to hit ^E^E and load up a real editor.)

I don't know what to hope for from these tests. It's already passed the two most basic ones, and is currently on it's second pass through the most advanced of the non-destructive tests. Finding something wrong would be nice, as it means that I can safey show the results to Maxtor and get it replaced. Passing the test would also be nice, meaning there appears to be no problem. But the thing is I know that there is a problem, and Maxtor won't even look at your drive if it passes all their tests.

So instead I sit here, without even a framebuffer enabled, and type and wait. Oh rapturous joy.

It would seem that while you can type up and save an entry in lynx, you can't actually post it. Guess I need to wait until I get back in an OS where I've installed a graphical browser.

Cleanup, Kernels, and Macs

This weekend, during my cleanup of old hardware,¹ I decided to take another shot at getting hel working. If you ever want to see slow then I suggest you try installing linux on a 68k Macintosh. Even a 68040 powered one. (Example: One pass of badblocks doing the read-only test took longer than 3 passes of the write test on skoll.)

Either way, after a while I finally got a basic install done. Due to the severe lack of memory I decided to grab the 2.4.21 kernel source and compile a very stripped down, machine specific kernel. Only, as I found out after the machine had spent several hours compiling, you can't. It seems that up until at least 2.4.21 the kernel had what was described in the 2.4.22 changelog as an "adbhid m68k screwup." Essentially what happened was that the kernel made reference to an undefined symbol called ADBREQ_RAW. So, if you wanted to compile a kernel on a 68k based Macintosh for the past 2 and a half years you've either had to use a 2.2 kernel or do without ADB support. I mean, it's not like anything important hooks up to the Apple Desktop Bus, just the keyboard.

It appears that 2.4.22 fixes this (not that the changelog entry is very definite about what got fixed), but given my habit of running a kernel that's one version behind the current stable one, I was unaware of this. (Compiling 2.4.22 right now and hoping it works.) To make matters worse, this apparently worked in the 2.2 series, but at some point during the transition to 2.4 it got broken and never was fixed until now.

However, this problem made me think of something again; when it comes time to look back at past linux kernels I don't think 2.4.x will be looked on favourably from a development viewpoint.

Let's consider the points, shall we? For starters, the kernel was late. I don't mean just a little late, I mean scoring #4 on Wired's top 10 vaporware of 2000 late.

But it finally got here, and after a few issues things became fairly decent for a while (or at least it's damn hard to search for stories about issues from that far back.) There was at least one serious bug, but that affected every kernel from 2.2.0 onwards.

Then, we hit 2.4.11.  A kernel that corrupted symlinks when you unmounted a drive and which forced the release of 2.4.12 just 2 days later. Ok, so that's one bad release, we'll allow that. After all, 2.2.9 was released just two days after 2.2.8.

Then, we have the VM management system swapped out in favour of another one.² Wait a minute, wasn't this the stable branch? That sounds more like something you'd do in the development branch instead of the production one.

So, one major issue and a rather questionable decision regarding the internals. Got all that? Because now we get into the teens.

• 2.4.13: Parallel port driver doesn't work. (It might not have even compiled, can't find out for sure.)
• 2.4.15 (aka greased-turkey): Corrupted the file system on unmount. Required the release of 2.4.16 4 days later.
• 2.4.18: rc3 gets released instead of rc4, breaking compilation on a variety of architectures. Gets fixed in 2.4.19-pre1 within a few hours, but doesn't get fixed in a production release for another 6 months.

Ok, so things have calmed down since then. The only major issue being a data corrupting bug in 2.4.20. I'll also give it that I really prefer 2.4 to 2.2 (if only because of iptables), but any kernel where you're better off waiting several months on the final stable release and picking and choosing the past releases doesn't say much for the development process.

Here's hoping 2.6 is better.

¹ I'll post pics of the massive pile of hardware that got thrown out once I get the film developed.
² I can't find when exactly this happened. It was sometime between 2.4.8 and 2.4.14 if I remember correctly.

I Am Un Chien Andalusia

Ways to get me excited:

1. Give me a large sum of money.
2. Buy me a NeXT machine.
3. Inform me that the Pixies are reuniting.

Ok, so the first two are quite unlikely, but it would seem that the third is a reality. No idea what prompted it, especially considering the break-up was supposedly very messy. Either way, it's supposedly official, now all that's left is for them to desecrate their legacy like so many other reunions before them. I don't know whether to be excited or scared.

50th Entry Celebration Bonanza !

"Dalton McGuinty: He's an evil reptilian kitten-eater from another planet," said a release from [Ontario Premier Ernie] Eves's campaign headquarters, e-mailed to news organizations across the province on Friday morning in the latest, and most bizarre, Tory attack on the Liberal leader.

I swear I'm not making this up, folks. You can read the story for yourself. Now, why can't New Brunswick politics be more exciting? I mean, on a quick run down we've got:

• Tory leader (and premier) Bernard Lord: Described by one commentator as "vanilla ripple."  Most people would be hard pressed to name something he's done other than get elected twice. Oh, and remove the highway tolls right after he came to power. (That was, after all, the issue that got him elected in the first place.)
• Liberal leader Shawn (Sean?) Graham: I seriously can not tell you a single thing about this guy. That's how boring he is.
• NDP leader Elizabeth Weir: Seriously, the only one here whom anyone would recognise. Also largely because she's the only NDP member who's been elected in the past 3 (4?) elections.

That's it folks, that's New Brunswick politics for you. Oh sure, there's occassionally other parties (like the Confederation Of Regions party, or COR, ex-Tories who didn't like bilingualism and who quickly sucumbed to in-fighting.) But for the most part it's just plain boring. Say what you like about MacKenna's policies, at least the guy was interesting.

On another note, I'm instigating Operation: Get Nancy To Post An Entry. That means if you know Nancy and you have a website then you should post a reference to getting Nancy to post an entry (and tell other people to do so.) Why yes, I am looking in you general direction, Peter.

Adventures in Editting

I have come to the conclusion that I spend too much time in vi.

The situation: I was trying to figure out why some code I was working on today wouldn't compile. I knew it should have worked, but instead I was getting the error "Syntax error on token ":", "boolean", "void", "byte", "short", "int", "long", "char", "float", "double", "Identifier", "interface", "class" expected." (vi users can probably already see exactly where this is going)

So, I go up to the line number listed in the output, I take a look, and what do I find? There at the end of the line are the two characters that messed everything up: :w. I had tried to enter command mode and write the file to disk using vi commands while in eclipse. I'm not sure what exactly this says; either I need a break or I need to start paying more attention when I code.

On another front, I went up to STU for lunch today. I can't say much about the sandwich I had, which may have something to do with the fact that the server claimed that no one had ever ordered one before, but I did discover one thing: I like cranberry mayo. Now I need to find some for my own use.

"These people give Joe Stalin a good name"

No real commentary here, I just felt like including links to stories about the RIAA's current legal actions that had what I felt to be choice quotes.

"It's time for the RIAA's winged monkeys to fly back to the castle and leave the Munchkins alone" - The Washington Post

"During a U.S. Senate hearing on Tuesday, Mr. Sherman was asked: "Are you headed to junior high schools to round up the usual suspects?"" - The Globe and Mail

"Record companies suing 12-year-old girls for file sharing is kind of like horse-and-buggy operators suing Henry Ford." - SFGate

Finally, as much as I hate to link to the The Inquirer as I see them as an excellent example of the concept of yellow journalism¹, I feel the need to include this quote:

"A few months ago, they announced over 700 lawsuits, and that tided them over for a while. Numbers show that since that announcement, file sharing is down substantially, and record sales are, err, down substantially also. Probably just a blip, sales declines of late have nothing to do with overpriced CDs, bad music offerings, and alienated users, it must be those filthy pirates." - The Inquirer

¹Interesting side note: apparently Joeseph Pulitzer, the man for whom the Pulitzer Prize is named, is generally not regarded favourably by historians due to his use of yellow journalism in The World.

Doo dah! Doo dah!

Quick note on the server: skoll is still running (thankfully), and I've switched over to MySQL. (There's actually a nice little script in the upgrade package that does all the transfers for you.)

I believe I had some issues with permissions earlier, so let my know if you run into any problems.

Moved! (Stress Testing Be Damned!)

Sometime this morning I successfully moved the website over to skoll; I figure this will be my stress testing.  The only major difference is that there is no longer a SSL enabled version of this site as the SPARC CPUs in this machine take forever to do any sort of encryption.  However, on the off chance that something goes terribly horribly wrong, I'm doing hourly backups of the MovableType database files.

My next order of business is to fix yasis so it doesn't choke and die and then to turn hermod (the former webserver) into a MySQL server, thereby allowing me to transfer the database from a file to that.  Of course, that's entirely dependent on when I finally get around to connecting and formatting the spare harddrive that's in there, so it could take a little while.  Not having had experience with setting up MySQL also makes it slightly trickier.  Stay tuned for developments in this gripping and heart pounding thriller.

g026r@skoll:~$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
cpu             : Texas Instruments, Inc. - SuperSparc-(II)
fpu             : SuperSparc on-chip FPU
promlib         : Version 3 Revision 2
prom            : 2.22
type            : sun4m
ncpus probed    : 2
ncpus active    : 2
Cpu0Bogo        : 49.86
Cpu1Bogo        : 49.97
MMU type        : TI Viking
contexts        : 65536
nocache total   : 1048576
nocache used    : 369408
CPU0            : online
CPU1            : online

Signed In Triplicate, Sent In, Sent Back, Queried, Lost, Found, Subjected To Public Inquiry, Lost Again, And Finally Buried In Soft Peat And Recycled As Firelighters

Oh boy, I just got the most wonderful news in the world today!  It seems that if you're using NRC equipment, facilities, or even using NRC staff for consultation then you have to get any experiments involving human subjects approved by their ethics review board.  Additionally (and more importantly), they also state that this review must occur even if it has been approved by another review board (i.e. a university).

My original thesis plan called for the ethics review to only go through the university; expected time: 1 - 2 weeks.  Now I may have to go through the NRC ethics board as well; expected time: 2 months.

Getting everything done by January is appearing increasingly difficult.

Dear Sir and/or Madam

While the webserver is still on the same machine it is no longer on the router – that function having be relegated back to heimdall.  This means that I need to know if I've royally messed something up on my iptables rules and since I access the server via its local IP I can't tell myself.  So just leave a comment below if you can read this and I'll take it that all is well.  Tell me whether or not you like the new drop caps I'm experimenting with or something.

84 packages upgraded, 23 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

The PSU for heimdall came in this morning and it has since powered up without any problems at all.   Ok, so by 'without any problems' I mean I spent half an hour trying to remember how you reconfigured a Mac boot ROM to boot anything but MacOS followed by 15 minutes trying to figure out what settings I had set that were preventing me from accessing the Internet.

However, it's up and running (albeit not in its usual function as a router) and is currently doing apt-get dist-upgrade to try and bring everything up to date. Hopefully it works better than the sparc, which started acting wonky when I tried to update.  It's undergoing another clean install (with 5 passes of badblocks) and I may end up leaving it on stable.

g026r@heimdall:~$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
cpu             : 604e
clock           : 180MHz
revision        : 2.4 (pvr 0009 0204)
bogomips        : 359.62
machine         : Power Macintosh
motherboard     : AAPL,7500 MacRISC
detected as     : 16 (PowerMac 7500)
pmac flags      : 00000000
L2 cache        : 256K unified
memory          : 96MB
pmac-generation : OldWorld

I was positive there was more than 96MB in this thing… And of course the fact that it's detected as a 7500 further adds to my PSU anger.

'The wolf that to Ironwood follows the glittering god'

Having finally gotten skoll up and running again I'm planning on moving this site to it sometime within the week.  That is, after I've done a few stress tests to make sure it's not going to randomly freeze on me again.  I do believe that was just badblocks though, and I think I've solved that problem.

Speaking of bad blocks, Sun machines are rather annoying to run a full write test (i.e. the destructive one) on.  When you partition the harddrive fdisk creates an empty Sun disklabel and sticks it at the start of the first partition – which is why you can't have a swap partition at the start of the drive.

Of course doing the full bad block test with badblocks destroys this disk label, thereby making the drive unbootable.  Which means, as I discovered after much frustration, that what you have to do is run fdisk and then run badblocks making sure to output to a file in a safe location (i.e. a RAM disk).  You then have to run fdisk again so as to create a new disk label and finally run mke2fs, passing it the badblocks file when you do so.  It's a pain in the ass to say the least.

Either way, it's running again so don't be surprised if the site is unreachable for a little while when I do the transfer.

Update: I just realised that I'll either have to break down and install PHP or I'm going to have to do some serious editting to get yasis working properly.

Great Googily-Woogily!

So if you don't know by now, Google has a function called the calculator.  You toss it a question, like what's the speed of sound or what's the radius of the earth and it comes back with an answer.  You can ask it to do conversions, like what's 50 Celsius in Fahrenheit or even give it more complex questions like what's two and a half times the speed of light divided by the gravitational constant in metric ton hours per furlong squared.
Oh, did I mention it also knows the answer to the ultimate question?

On another Google related note, I'll challenge anyone to a Google Fight.  In fact, I'll even make it easy.  Just toss your name in the form below.

Great Three-Toed Sloth of Ice Planet Hoth!

I've posted stuff about Microsoft's sideways scrolling mouse before, but this is some new info.
Seems some of the models will be leather clad.

Leather Clad?! Did I read that wrong? (Nope, that's what it says)
Who needs a leather clad mouse? What's the point of a leather clad mouse? What's next? Chrome detailed monitors? Jewel encrusted towers? Cusomisable POST beeps?

(I just don't get it I guess…)

Mmmmm…

Gaiman & Cthulhu… I think I'm in heaven.

What?! 35 dollars?! All right, let me get my wallet…

(I also just found out he did one of the short stories on the Matrix website. As much as I dislike the Matrix, I have to admit that this story is very damn good.)

Update: Even better, free Gaiman penned Cthulhu. Amusing stuff too.

1.8026 x 10¹² furlongs per fortnight

Enjoy

I think I'm going to do all my calculations in knots from now on. Although nautical leauges per leapyear does look tempting…

Monkey Phone Call!

The time: The end of the dot com bubble.
The place: Journeyman Press, a now defunct 4 person division of the US Playing Card Company.
The idea: Replicate the excitement and anguish of online auctions in a card game.
The result: eBay the card game!

 Continue reading Monkey Phone Call!

Ok, so it wasn't actually the end of the dot com bubble, but actually sometime in 2001, after it had already burst.  Either way, someone, somewhere decided that it would be a good idea to buy the rights and produce an eBay card game.  Listen, I don't pretend to understand the reasoning either but let's just live with it.  Ok?

So, what's the point of the game then?  Well, put simply, it's to buy items that match specific categories.  The first person to match all the categories wins.  Sounds simple, doesn't it?  Well, not really…

The first kicker is the rules sheet.  Sure it's only two sides of a fairly large page, but only one person out of the four of us who played this could actually manage to finish more than one side.

So, we'll skip the rules and learn as we go along.  To tell the truth, that was probably easier anyways.

Basically, there's 4 types of cards: curio cards, bidding cards, the starter card, and item cards.  There's plenty of cards, and at any one moment you could have up to 4 different types to take care of, but at least the colours are designed to keep you from mixing them up.  There still were issues with people confusing bidding and curio cards though.

Anyways, basic idea: at the start of the game, each player draws a set number of curio cards.  Each of these cards has a category on it, the first person to acquire one item for each curio card they have wins the game.

So, how do you go about acquiring items?  Well, since this is eBay, you bid on them.  The bidding cards contain either cash which let you bid on one item per turn or actions which let you screw over other players.  Each turn your're allowed to bid on one item and/or play one action card.  The items cards represent a variety of urban legends (e.g. the jet powered hatchback), oddities, and things you'd actually expect to find on eBay.

Enough with the rules already.  I believe I did say they were boring an complicated.  Instead, let's answer the important question: is it any fun to play?  Well, yes and no.

For starters, the game isn't as bad as you'd expect when someone says 'Hey, did you know there's such a thing as an eBay card game?'  It's amusing in it's own little way (monkey phone call), but as James pointed out it probably would be a lot more fun after a few drinks.  The only problem with that is the game is complicated enough as it is.

What do I mean?  I mean you have to constantly be paying attention or the game will get screwed up.&bsp; For starters, each round ends when everyone has taken a turn, at which point you turn all the dice marking the length of time for the auctions left down by one.  If you mess up and fail to flip one down, you're in trouble.  Then, after each round, the person who started the last round doesn't start the next round.  Rather, you pass the starter card to the left and play continues from there until all players have played again.

Additionally, regardless what the back of the box says, the game is in no ways fast paced.  It may be over quickly, but turns seem to take forever.

Final verdict?  If you find it in a dollar shop (as was this ccase), buy it and chuckle.  You probably won't feel the urge to play it more than the initial time though.

I almost forgot, there's even a card in there for Nancy.

Posted by g026r at 18:34 | 6 comments | Most recent by g026r

Smoke. Acrid. Burning Eyes. Smoke. Pain.

Note to self: No matter how addled my brain may be, I will never again accidently turn the heat up to high while there is a frying pan full of oil on the stove.

Luckily I had a box of baking soda handy. Now I just have to live with all my clothes smelling of smoke until I can get them through the wash, something I had just finished doing yesterday morning.

Update - 22:25:  With all my windows open and all my fans going, the air is now looking somewhat clearer. Still stinks though.

Update - Wed. Morning I can now plug the smoke alarm back in without it going crazy.  I also bought some air fresheners and it now smells of air freshener and… *sniff* *sniff* What's that smell? I do believe it's smoke.

Yet another update -Wed. Evening I just finished checking the frying pan after I cleaned it again.  Seems the fire took the teflon off parts of it and has left the rest with a lovely black coating that refuses to come off.  I just love spending money when I didn't want to…