Yippee.

Oct 30 05:10:17 heimdall kernel: eth0: Transmit error, Tx status register 82.
Oct 30 05:10:17 heimdall kernel: Probably a duplex mismatch.  See Documentation/networking/vortex.txt
Oct 30 05:10:17 heimdall kernel:   Flags; bus-master 1, dirty 96105(9) current 96105(9)
Oct 30 05:10:17 heimdall kernel:   Transmit list 00000000 vs. c0b12440.
Oct 30 05:10:17 heimdall kernel:   0: @c0b12200  length 800000d5 status 000100d5
Oct 30 05:10:17 heimdall kernel:   1: @c0b12240  length 800000a5 status 000100a5
Oct 30 05:10:17 heimdall kernel:   2: @c0b12280  length 800000d5 status 000100d5
Oct 30 05:10:17 heimdall kernel:   3: @c0b122c0  length 800000a5 status 000100a5
Oct 30 05:10:17 heimdall kernel:   4: @c0b12300  length 800000f5 status 000100f5
Oct 30 05:10:17 heimdall kernel:   5: @c0b12340  length 800000a5 status 000100a5
Oct 30 05:10:17 heimdall kernel:   6: @c0b12380  length 800000a5 status 000100a5
Oct 30 05:10:17 heimdall kernel:   7: @c0b123c0  length 80000155 status 00010155
Oct 30 05:10:17 heimdall kernel:   8: @c0b12400  length 800000c5 status 800100c5
Oct 30 05:10:17 heimdall kernel:   9: @c0b12440  length 800005e2 status 000105e2
Oct 30 05:10:17 heimdall kernel:   10: @c0b12480  length 80000082 status 00010082
Oct 30 05:10:17 heimdall kernel:   11: @c0b124c0  length 800000e5 status 000100e5
Oct 30 05:10:17 heimdall kernel:   12: @c0b12500  length 800000c5 status 000100c5
Oct 30 05:10:17 heimdall kernel:   13: @c0b12540  length 800003df status 000103df
Oct 30 05:10:17 heimdall kernel:   14: @c0b12580  length 800000a5 status 000100a5
Oct 30 05:10:17 heimdall kernel:   15: @c0b125c0  length 800000a5 status 000100a5

I've got tons of these in my logs, with anywhere from a couple of seconds to a couple of hours in between them. I'm going to check to see if there is a duplex problem, but I'm personally wondering if the card may be bad. In other words: don't be surprised if the site disappears.

Holy Shit

For those who don't know where I live relative to the UNB campus (i.e. everyone except Nancy) I'm going to give a little description of my walk to school.

I leave my apartment and head down a street towards Forest Hill Road, which runs in front of the university. About half way down I turn onto a side street and walk until I come to a path between houses. I take this path and I eventually come out by an old industrial building that is in the process of being torn down. From there it's just a quick sprint across the highway and I'm at the southeastern most point of campus, just behind the Aitken Centre.

To get back home I just follow the reverse. It's not an exciting walk, but tonight was a little different.

Tonight, as I was walking up the hill next to the Aitken Centre, I could spot the lights on the top a transport truck that appeared to be parked along the side of the road.

"That's odd. There's really not enough room for a transport to pull onto the shoulder there, and there's even less of a reason for one to do so"

As I get closer I can see it's not just a transport truck, there's cars lined up all the way down the hill as far as I can see and there's a few people running back and forth in between some of them.

"Awww feck This isn't going to make it easier."

I get closer and notice that, except for two cars, all the other cars seem to have stopped in the one lane. Ok, an accident, this makes sense. It's not going to make it any easier to cross, but it makes sense.

As I get closer I notice that there's something odd. The car behind the first one doesn't seem to be damaged. As I keep getting closer I can hear the sound of sirens approaching and notice that a number of people seem to be gathered around one spot on the highway. There's a pair of feet visible from where I currently am. As I keep walking (the professionals are just beginning to show up and I didn't see anything, so it's no use for me to stick around) I get a better look at the car in front and everything becomes clear.

It's a white van, a taxi. The windshield is covered with cracks and the bumper has something dark splashed over it and part of the hood.

Fuck.

Crossing over the highway is a frequent activity with students, there's even paths visible at several of the more popular spots to do so. If you live in the area I live in then doing so can cut 20 to 30 minutes off of a walk to school. It was really just a matter of time before something like this happened and I'm personally surprised that nothing was ever done to address the issue. Something definitely should, and probably will, be done now. Unfortunately, knowing Fredericton they'll probably do something like erect a fence all along the edge of the highway, rather than doing something constructive like erecting a walkway over the traffic.

More Unscheduled Downtime

The site was down again today, but this time I had nothing to do with it. Rather, the power blipped a few times in the afternoon, once again knocking out every machine except the webserver itself — which I later turned off when I failed to notice that it was still running and it was only that the power LED was burnt out.

Ok, so maybe some blame could be put on me because it was a) only a blip, b) I own a UPS which should have been able to handle it, except that c) I've never gotten around to replacing the battery in it.

I'm Gonna Let the Bad Times Roll

There's a lessson to be learnt here, I'm sure of it. Mainly, don't upgrade important parts of your router from a remote location. What follows is an explanation of why, and a quick, not-horribly-technical explanation of why the site was down:

I realised that I hadn't run apt-get upgrade on my router for a while, so I did so during my lunch break. Among the things that upgrades were gotten for was the PPP daemon. Ok, not a serious problem, the IP changes but thankfully ddclient reregisters it with DynDNS and I can reconnect.

So, where do the problems come in? Well, among the other things I noticed was that I had very little free space on my root partition. A quick search revelead that the culprit was daemon.log, which was taking up a total of 120MB between the current log and the previous one. Part of the reason? The DHCP daemon was set to a 10 minute lease, meaning that any issues that occurred got printed in there 6 times per hour. So, I edit the DHCP config file and set it for a longer lease period. Restart the server and all should be good.

Errrrrr… No.

Seems that I forgot that I never fixed the PPP script so that it didn't overwrite the reference to the local DNS server and the DHCP addresses are bound to local host names. So it assigned random IPs to the DB and web servers, meaning you could no longer access them they way you normally would.

Now I've forgotten all about the DNS issue, so I'm trying random things to get it to work. (Reloading the iptables rules, taking down the network interface, restarting DHCP, restarting the network — in that order, which is important later.) I finally figure out what it is, connect to the machines on their new addresses, tell it to restart the network connection, and watch as they disappear off the network.

Remember how I said that the order I tried things was important? Well, it seems that dhcpd didn't like me restarting it while that interface was still down. Whoops.

So by then my machines are completely unreachable remotely. Time to put up the "please standby" page that resides on the router and wait until I get home.

Hmmmm… That was not anywhere near as non-technical as I promised, was it? Well then, one sentence non-technical summary: Andrew fucked up.

R = 107, G = 107, B = 107

The following has been verified as being true.

Enjoy!

Silly Quotations

Today's silly quote comes to us courtesy of the LA Times, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, and the Barna Research Group.

Barna recently performed a survey of American beliefs related to death, heaven, and hell. The results weren't terribly surprising; roughly 3 quarters of those surveyed believed in heaven and hell, with nearly 2 thirds believing they are bound for heaven and less than one percent claiming to be residing in a warm handbasket.

That's not where the quote comes from, and I'm not going to give you my thoughts on that (although I'm sure they're fairly obvious). No, I'm interested in the section of the article that refers to the results from self-proclaimed atheists and agnostics. More specifically, this quote:

"[H]alf the atheists and agnostics surveyed believed that everyone had a soul, that heaven and hell existed and that there was life after death. One in eight atheists and agonistics believe that accepting Jesus Christ as savior probably makes life after death possible."

Wait a minute, accepting Jesus Christ as saviour makes life after death possible? What the hell kind of atheists are we talking about here? I'm thinking they missed the part of the definition that says "one who denies the existence of God." Wait a minute, that's the entire definition.

I'd say "Only in America, folks," but somehow I'm sure that that's not the case.

"I was ashamed quickly / By the salmon of the dusk"

"It's said that if an infinite number of monkeys were each given typewriters for an infinite number of years, they'd come up with the complete works of William Shakespeare. We wondered if the same would apply to the works of Dylan Thomas."

Ok, so it's not simian poetry, but it's still kind of amusing. I give you: the BBC's Dylan Thomas Random Poetry Generator! Or, if you'd rather, you can compare it to actual poems by Thomas (including, of course, his best known piece), who died 50 years ago on November 9th.

Warning! Long Whinge Filled Entry Approaching!

What a week. Let's review, shall we?

We'll start with Thursday, in true family fashion my father shows up over half an hour late, meaning we got to the boat just as they were sounding the boarding call for walk-on passengers. Of course, this is actually a blessing in disguise as it means we have to spend less time in Saint John. (Proposed motto: "You'll get used to the smell, we promise.")

The boat ride to Digby wasn't so bad, I had my iPod and it was nice and calm. Certainly was a change from the last time I took the ferry, on that occasion it was in the middle of a spring storm. Water the boat was pitching and rolling, water was spalhing up on the decks, and everyone was lying down trying to keep from being sick except for three middle-aged men who were standing at the front window talking loudly about what they had eaten for lunch.

Anyways, not a bad boat ride there; passed time by staring out the window and a few minutes with the small array of arcade machines. Missile Command and Centipede kicked my ass, and Ms. Pac-Man succeeded in only giving it a mild paddling. Finally we arrive in Digby and then it's a forty-five minute drive to  my aunt's house in Sainte Alphonse where the real fun begins.

Picture four middle-aged women, not all of whom probably got along well as children, all worked up and crammed in with each other for the past several days. Apparently they had already had disagreements about which room the visitation was going to be in and how much English (or rather, how little English) should be in the service. I show up around the same time as one of my cousins and make the mistake of saying that, like him, I don't have a tie with me either.

Now, let's review the process that led me not to bring a tie:

"Your cousins aren't going to be wearing suits, so don't brinq your suit."
"Ok, so what do I wear?"
"Don't you own any dress shirts?"
"Other than what I wear with my suit, no. The only other clothes I wear are the stuff I wear everyday."
"Well then, wear that sweater and a shirt. You know, that sweater."

Seeing as "that sweater" is green and the ties I own are red, well, even the fashion impaired can see the problem with that. So no ties went with me.

That passed eventually and it was time to decide where I was going to sleep. My mother's suggestions ranged from the bad (in the same room as my father, who snores like a chainsaw) to the ludicrous (in the laundry room, which has a cement floor, no heater, and is right next to the room my father was sleeping in.) That satisfied, my aunt came in and started suggesting all the places that had already been rejected and then my mother came back bound and determined that I was going to sleep in the laundry room.

Finally, sleep. Friday was visitation, which basically consisted of me sitting in a chair for four hours while staring at the opposite wall. This of course was broken by the occassional introduction to some nth cousin nth removed, who I had never met before and I'll likely never meet again.

Saturday was the funeral itself, the mass had more English than my aunt cared for, and I probably made a pig of myself at the reception afterwards. But, as my sister said, it was probably the only food we were served all weekend that I actually could eat.

This morning we got up well before six and were on the road well before seven. Another trip on the boat across, which consisted laregely of me watching the same fifteen minute news loop on CTVNewsNet and standing out on the deck staring at the water, as my iPod had died and the charger had been left in Fredericton. Trip was a bit choppier, with a few major rolls and pitches that left me wondering just how someone was supposed to play the pinball machine that was located in the lounge. Eventually the water started to turn from a deep green to a greenish yellow, then to a yellowish brown, and finally to the point where the whitecaps weren't whitecaps so much as sickly yellow caps. Welcome to Saint John.

So, here I am, all unpacked, fed, exhausted, and having to go back in to work tomorrow. If I wasn't so behind on my thesis I'd take a few days off just to sleep.

Hey, I warned you it was long and whingey.

Learn to swim. Learn to swim. Learn to swim.

My sister's flight doesn't get in until an hour or so after the ferry leaves today, this means that I'm still here. Seeing as I told Jo I wouldn't be in for the rest of the week I've decided to use today to finish up important things around the apartment, like filling in my COE form for my student loan, and not so important things like learning more about Movable Type's tag format.

I've managed to find a way to get the last person to post a comment's name to show up. The only problem is that I can't figure out how to prevent it from displaying anything if no comments exist. Ah well, I'm sure I'll figure it out eventually.

Update: D'oh! That was an incredibly easy fix, I can't believe I even made that mistake…

If I Should Fall From Grace With God

There was a power blip when I was at work today, which resulted in all my systems that use soft power switches shutting down. Seeing as that includes both my database server and (more importantly) my router, the net result was that this site was unreachable for most of the day.

The snow has turned to rain, culminating in large chunks of semi-frozen slush falling violently from the top of the NRC building. It's fairly impressive to watch, but not something you'd want to be under — something the director found out last winter when a chunk of snow hit his car. Thankfully, despite the slightly higher temperatures, I haven't had a repeat of last weekend and my bedroom is still staying relatively dry.

Finally, one last comment; don't expect any updates until probably Sunday at the earliest. My grandfather passed away at roughly five o'clock this morning, a fact I only found out about a few hours ago. The date of the funeral still hasn't been finalised, but I'll likely be catching the ferry from Saint John to Digby sometime tomorrow.

Early Morning Update

It's snowing right now, I think that's about all I need to say.

Eep?

Since I can't seem to finish a coherent entry¹, I've decided to throw this little tidbit out to the hungry masses:²

The Orion Slave Girl Page

That's right, Orion slave girls, as in the green-skinned women from Star Trek. Now you too can indulge your fetish for the Savage She-Hulk with images of famous actresses/models/singers coloured green.³

As someone once said, "If there's one thing the Internet's taught me it's that there is a fetish for everything and it's got its own website!" Or, as Dmitrii so succinctly put it, "wtf?!"

¹ Ok, so it's not like failure to create a coherent entry has ever stopped me from posting in the past.
² There's more than two of you, that constitutes "masses" in my books.
³No, I don't get it either.

As Seen Somewhere

I spotted that the other day and it amused me. I don't know what's sadder though: the fact that I get that or the fact that I'm wondering what it would be for middle endian

Every Dragging Handclap Over Every Dragging Beat

If you talked to me about an hour ago I would have been giddy and estatic. Right now, I'm not, and it's all for the same reason.

But what could have such an effect on me? Simple: iTunes for Windows.

I downloaded it, I uninstalled XPlay and installed iTunes. iTunes informed me that I should reboot but, being the impatient bastard that I am, I just started it up anyways.

Up comes the window, slowly mind you, but it's there and in the menu is an item labelled 'g026r's iPod' complete with all the songs on it.

Score!

So I play with a bit, then I restart my machine because I figure I should. Windows loads up and I get a message about an iPod being installed but no software available. Ok, to be expected. I forgot to install a program to read HFS filesystems and before it was just running off of the bits of XPlay that hadn't been removed.

So I grab a program, install it, and try again. Hmmm… This time it's telling me that iTunes needs to be reinstalled to load the iPod drivers. Ok then, reinstall iTunes, reboot, same message. Hrmm. Now I should be using the FAT32 iPod anyways since I'm in Windows, but there's conflicting reports over whether or not AAC files work in it. I guess there's only one way to find out.

Fast forward to the present and I now have a 'WinniePod' and I'm reripping CDs into AAC format to find out if they'll work. Wish me luck.

Go Go Speed Racer?

I got my hands on some extra RAM from Dmitrii, who no longer has a need for his SPARCstation. The RAM's now up to 128MB, so hopefully it will swap to disk less and that should result in faster CGI scripts. Hopefully.

Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows!

For those who missed it, Slashdot just recently ran a piece on colour blindness and it's effects on games.

Buried (well, at least when I looked at it) in the comments were a couple of links that I found interesting. The first was a link to a company which sells charts that show what the web safe colour table looks like to someone with deuteranopia, a common form of red-green colour blindness. Unfortunately, since they're a commercial entity, the free images they supply aren't that useful but, as someone who's not colour blind, they certainly give you an idea of what colours work and what don't.

The second one (and I find it even more interesting) is an organisation (?) called Vischeck who provide a free service that allows you to view images or websites under three different forms of colour blindness. (Deuteranope — a form of red-gree colour blindness, Protanope — another form of red-green, and Tritanope — a form of blue-yellow colour-blindness) They even provide plugins for Photoshop and a Java-based image suite called ImageJ so that you can test them out on your own machine.

I personally think this website looks kind of odd with the purple sidebar, but at least it's readable.

It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown

Just in time for Halloween, it's the monster movie maestros quiz.

I only managed 50 points. : (

Impulse Purchases

I went out for lunch with my parents before heading back to Frdericton today. Following the food, my father mentioned he needed to duck into Wal-Mart for 'a moment' to get his passport photo done. I know my parents fairly well, and when my father says he'll only be a moment you had better hope you didn't have anything pressing planned for the near future. So, I got them to drop me off at the neighbouring Chapters while they went about their business. Now, as has previously been implied, letting me into a Chapters is a very bad idea. Nothing causes me to lose all semblence of self-control faster than books. Ok, and cheesecake. Books and cheesecake.

I do a quick search for a few books I've been looking for and once I fail to find them I start browsing. Following a trip through History and Poli Sci., I end up in the Science Fiction/Fantasy section. While browsing through those shelves I spot something bright yellow with one of the strangest titles I've ever seen. In short, I spot this.

I rarely make a purchase of a book I've never heard of based solely on the fact that it catches my eye, but in this case my curiousity was more than just piqued. A quick glance at the inside cover showed that the author has a habit of using odd titles (sample title: Armageddon the Musical), but still, there's something about this title that grabs my attention. I'm thinking I'm going to have to break my standard book buying rules here.

I can't give a review seeing as I haven't read it yet, but with a title like that it's either going to be good or crap, no in between. I still haven't found out too much about the author (most of his books on Amazon have too few reviews to form a balanced picture), but at least one author has felt the need to praise him. Here's hoping!

On another note: For some reason Movable Type doesn't include a section to edit the search templates in its template listing. I get more than a little annoyed when I have to find files myself.

Happy Thanksgiving, Charlie Brown

I'm home for Thanksgiving for the first time since 1998. Therefore entries for the next few days are likely to be more infrequent as well as full of potatoes and possibly cranberry sauce.

expletive deleted

Originally this was a long unfocused rant about GNU software projects (focusing largely on GNOME), bloat, package dependencies, 'design by committee'-style decisions (including one reference to the ATM packet size), and how Debian was begining to move from the 'pissing me off' section that most operating systems occupy to the 'fucking pissing me off' section that I've reserved for distros like Mandrake. All caused by the fact that GnuCash wouldn't install without first installing the enlightenment sound daemon on a machine that has no sound drivers loaded.

So what happened to it?

Well, call it a flash of clarity. I hit about 500 words and realised that not only had I failed to develop any semblence of a coherent argument, but I had also completely lost track of where I was going with it. So instead (and to make up for the lack of content in the previous entry) you get this lovely meta-entry. Enjoy!

Random Update

New Tarantino film comes out tomorrow.

Ok, so it's only part one of a two-parter (I blame Miramax), but at least we don't have to wait 3 years for a disappointing sequel. (cheap shot)

Mmmmm… Tarantino directed martial-arts film; what's not to like about that? I figure that I'll probably see it sometime next week when it costs less. Until then mmmmmm…

"Disappoint sequel sequel"? Note to self: Read entries before I hit save. Bad Andrew! Bad!

You're So Vain, I Bet You Think This Post Is About You

Courteousy of the Globe and Mail. (Who got it from USA Today, who aren't even mentioned in that article…)

"Toes are going under the podiatric knife, writes Olivia Barker in USA Today. Those second and third toes -- the ones that poke out beyond the big toe, the ones seen by some as embarrassing as a set of jug ears -- are getting shortened. And the fourth and fifth toes are getting straightened. "Shoes are like jewelry now," says Suzanne Levine, a New York podiatric surgeon. Toe shortening involves cutting a small piece of bone out of the joint and reattaching the tendon. Patients are back to the office after a weekend, back jogging in a month."

I can understand things like ears, noses, &c.— but toes? Somedays I fear for society…

Click OK To Continue

Quick background for those of you who need it:

In 1999 Microsoft was sued by a company known as Eolas Technology, Inc. over a software patent the latter had licensed from the University of California. The patent, filed in 1994 and titled "Distributed hypermedia method for automatically invoking external application providing interaction and display of embedded objects within a hypermedia document", covered the ability of a user to view an embedded program object within a browser window. In other words, just about any plugin you can think of.

A few months ago it was ruled that Microsoft was in violation of the patent and Eolas was awarded $520 million in damages. Since then Microsoft has announced that it will appeal the ruling yet at the same time make what they term "modest changes" to both Internet Explorer and Windows in order to be in compliance with the trial verdict.

Recently they announced some of the changes that have been made to Internet Explorer to meet these requirements.

Of these changes the most noticable to the end user is the fact that every ActiveX control now pops up a dialog with the text "Press OK to continue loading the page" and a single "OK" button. (You can view a picture of it here) That's right, no "Cancel" button, no description of why you have to press OK, just a single non-informative line of text and one button.

Needless to say, I don't approve of this development.

There's a fine line between giving a user too much information and giving a user too little information. You don't want to overload and confuse them by giving them too much information that they can't make sense of it (i.e. an error dialog that shows a memory address or some cryptic debug statements), but at the same time you don't want to confuse them by providing far too little information. This dialog is a perfect example of the latter.

Additionally, the potential annoyance factor of this dialog is quite high seeing as it displays, not once for each page with an ActiveX control, but rather for every ActiveX control on the page that doesn't meet a narrow set of requirements. Anyone who's tried browsing the web using IE with ActiveX controls turned off can tell you that it's irritating enough being informed once per page about controls, imagine once per control.

It also makes you wonder whether this will create a conditioned response in the users. They read the first couple of dialogs, pressing "OK" when they do so. Eventually they stop reading the dialogs as thoroughly, and finally they just click "OK" without even bothering to consider what the dialog says. Now, imagine a malicious script that pops up a dialog with a request immediately upon the page loading. There is the potential that the user will automatically click "OK", having become accustomed to doing so. I don't think I need to further elaborate on what the potential consequences of such actions could be…

Now it's a fairly obvious fact that there's no love lost when it comes to me and Internet Explorer, a quick skim through my entries regarding stylesheets would confirm that. But I don't think this is a good thing. Not from a legal perspective, as it gives the patent holders precendent to go after other browsers, and not from an interface perspective.

…and with that the rant falls apart. This is where a conclusion should go, but I've never been good at them, especially when I'm working on 3 hours of sleep. All I can say is that I'm glad I use Mozilla and that I hope Eolas doesn't decide to set their sights on other browser manufacturers. Now I'm off to find me some lunch.

Quick note: As the patent applies to almost all plugins I'm unsure whether this affects just ActiveX or other plugins (such as Flash) as well. The info I found just mentioned ActiveX, but it could include others as well.

Paging All Insomniacs!

I've got a problem, and it's not the one that Peter made reference to earlier. This one's got absolutely nothing to do with bits of silicon, plastic, and metal run by series of 1s and 0s. No, this one is much simpler.

I can't sleep.

I'm tired. I can't look at a monitor or read a book without my eyes feeling like they're going to sink into my head and my eyelids getting heavy. However, once I turn out the lights and let my head hit the pillow all that disappears. That's right, I'm only sleepy until I try to get to sleep.

So, what I'm looking for are people's tricks and solutions for getting to sleep. Warm milk, soothing music, whatever. Just gimme!

Sick Again

Ugh. I think I've got the flu.

I can't claim impressive complications, like some people, but I've still got it. No idea where it came from though, as my thesis work doesn't exactly put me into contact with a lot of people.

So to pass the time I've dug out my thick blanket, I've got some hot tea, and I've slapped some Bogey in the DVD drive. If I'm going to feel miserable I may as well enjoy myself in the process.

The Continuing Saga of 'I Must Be Crazy'

Note to self: Although no minimum system requirements are listed for OpenDarwin 6.6.2 on x86, a Celeron 400 is probably stretching it.

But why would I bother installing OpenDarwin anyways?

Well, somehow this evening I ended up at the OpenDarwin webpage. While there I decided to browse through the documentation on the x86 port of the OS. So, what's the first thing I see when I look at the x86 release notes?

"Only the PIIX4 IDE controllers have been found to work."

"PIIX4?" I think, "That's just a little on the old side. Wait a minute! My Celeron uses the PIIX4 IDE controller!"

So, a quick check of the ports tree later and I've discovered that, yes, it does have a version of MySQL ported to it. Cue one ISO and three attempts to burn it.

Making sure I've copied the contents of my database over to files so I can rebuild it afterwards, I hook up a keyboard and monitor, stick the CD in, and sudo reboot. Up loads the CD, and away we go!

Now I'm sitting here waiting, waiting, waiting; much like Darwin, which keeps telling me that it's "Waiting for the Apple Security Server" between other tasks. It took nowhere near this long to boot into the install system, I can only hope it's because it's configuring stuff. I suppose I'll just have to find out in the morning.

I Must Be Crazy (Pt. II)

Previously on This Space Intentionally Left Blank:

Andrew professed a desire to install that joke of the operating system world, the GNU/Hurd. We now return to our story.

Well, the Hurd attempt didn't go quite as planned. It seems I got rid of the hard drive I was planning to install it on. Since I'm having to use a spare hard drive until I get my replacement from Maxtor I don't have any others lying around to install onto.

Does this mean the end of my attempt to simultaneously install a new OS and force the Uptimes Project to add another icon? Of course not. Infact I've managed to find an even odder OS to install.

Plan 9? Been there, done that.
Inferno? Tried Plan 9, got scared. Not willing to try its successor.
QNX? Hey, I said odd OS here.
A/UX? Ah! Now we're talking!

Yes, not only have I managed to get my hands on some A/UX CDs, I've also discovered that, seeing as I have the 68882 add-on, my Mac IIsi is compatible with the operating system.

So, what is A/UX? The simple answer is Apple Unix. The longer answer is that it's a combination of AT&T's System V.2.2 (along with extensions from V.3 and V.4 and bits from BSD4.2 and 4.3) and Apple's System 7 (via a virtual machine) for certain Macintoshes that use the Motorola 68000 family of processors.

So, is it good for anything that you can't do in MacOS or Linux/BSD? Well, not really. You can run most MacOS apps via a supposedly fairly efficient emulation layer. You can run X11 (complete with twm). You can telnet in. But it's old, it's been unsupported for years, and what software has been ported over is relatively old. (apache 1.0 anyone?)

However, it's not like I was really planning on doing much with that Mac anyways. So, onto it goes A/UX and a copy of an acnient version perl5 so I can port my uptimes client.

Well, that's the plan anyways. Because after I finally got the boot floppy written I found out that that CDROM drive has decided to act very wonky indeed. In fact, it won't even recognise that a CD has been inserted in it. (Despite the fact that the CDs are recognisable using BasiliskII.) To make matters worse, these are the only CDs that the drive isn't recognising.

MacOS install CD? Sure.
Debian/m68k ones I burnt a while back? Why not?
Some ISO9660/HFS CDs I have of old Infocom games? Bring 'em on!
A/UX? Ermm… No.

I have a few ideas on what might work, but I'm tired and it's already after midnight. I'll sacrifice the mandatory goats to my SCSI chain tomorrow.

Good News/Bad News

As the title says, there's good news and bad news to go with this, my third entry of the evening.

First the good news: I finally managed to get my student loan assesment, and I may be able to keep high speed Internet access because of it. I need to work out my finances first to know for sure. (In other words: Peter, I'll keep you informed as to whether or not I'll still need web hosting.)

So what's the bad news? Well, they're expecting me to contribute what amounts to approximately 144% of my income to pay my expenses. Since the New Brunswick Student Aid offices are in Fredericton you can probably guess who I'm going to be paying a visit first thing on Monday morning.

"You will give 110 percent."
"That's imposible. No one can give more than 100 percent. By definition that's the most anyone can give."

Happy Happy Joy Joy!

Well, I think I may have found out what I can do with my router once I get the broadband disconnected.

It seems that the PowerMac 7300 is compatible with BeOS R5 for PPC. If my copy of BeOS also includes the PPC version (I can't remember how it was distributed, whether it was one arch on a CD or both) then I think I'll be able to fulfill my nostalgic rambling from a previous entry.

Wheeeeeeeee! Just checked, it says 'Intel & PPC'. Happy joy indeed!

Ewww…Tofu Water.

Well, I did a 'What I learnt on my   summer   autumn vacation' entry, so here's a 'What I learnt on my first week back from vacation' entry. (And yes Peter, this one is in essay format.)

For starters, I've learnt that I either need to start buying smaller rolls of film or start taking pictures more often. I finished and developed a film that was in my camera and found that about half of it was pictures of me with an ex-girlfriend whom I haven't been seeing for well over a year. On the bright side, I did manage to get pictures of the big ugly yellow thing and UNB's latest artistic monstrosity.

I've also found out that Windows takes up too much damn space.

Actually, I knew that already, but installing XP onto a 6 gig hard drive really drove the point home. After installing Windows and all the programs that I can't do without I've only got about a gig free. That's maybe one or two games that I can use to pass my time.

The lack of space has also cut into the amount of music I have readily at my disposal, meaning I've been listening to only a handful of albums lately. On the plus side to that, I've developed a new appreciation for artists that I only marginally enjoyed before like Ash and the Detroit Cobras.

On the thesis front it's definitely going to shit and hard. Ethics approval is now a week later than we had originally planned. There are software bugs that still won't go away. (Thankfully they only affect me and not the experiment participants.) I'm getting worried that our recogniser might have too many sloppy strokes defined making it almost impossible not to enter the correct characters. (There's currently 159 ways you can enter 28 characters, with 5 of the characters yet to have sloppy strokes implemented.)

But, that's not the worst of it. The worst of it are the hardware problems that cropped up in our pilot run.

On the least worrying end of the scale is that fact that the battery on the MA V doesn't look like it will last through an entire session on a full charge. Thankfully there's a spare one, so it can be swapped if need be. However the audio is turning out to be terrible. Any audio coming through the USB headphones produces static that makes it unusable. We've tried updating the drivers, using different headphones, and connecting to the docking station instead of the MA V in case it was the port on the later. All have the same result — nothing.

Danny's supposed to be looking at it, but the experiment can't start until it gets worked out. The fun just keeps piling up on that front!

Finally it's just been cold here lately. I don't mean standard begininning of October cold, I mean suddenly going from walking around with your jacket unbuttoned to 'able see your breath at 10 in the morning' cold. I'm really not looking forward to winter right about now.

Hmmm… Well that deviated away from 'what I learnt on my first week back from vacation' fairly quickly.

Beating My Head Against The Wall

Right, so I'm soliciting help now, as I've got a stylesheet issue.

It works like this: IE is refusing to stretch out the links box, despite the fact that it has both a left and right attribute set. In fact, IE seems to complete ignore the right attribute despite the fact that the W3C specification states that defining width using left and right attributes is a perfectly valid method. Rather it makes it just big enough to fit the contents and no larger. Instead I want it stretching out until 10px from the right edge of the window as it's doing in other browsers.

Ok, so completely ignore the right attribute isn't quite right. IE views the right attribute as a maximum. It will stretch a box out until it's the specified distance from the right edge and no farther if the content in the box is that large. If not, it will simply make the box smaller.

…And before anyone asks no, using width attributes is not an option.

God-damned non-standards-conforming piece of…

Anyone?

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When I heard that Halifax was supposed to get part of Hurricane Juan I was a little jealous. I mean, strong winds, lots of rain, what's not to like?

Well, I take all that back.

Thanks to my sister for sending me these and to whoever the hell took them and is hosting them. There's a lot more of them here.

Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?

It's late, I don't have much to say, yet at the same time I feel like posting an entry. Guess what that means? You got it! It's miscellaneous link time!

Handy Latin Phrases — Because everyone needs to know how to say "I can't hear you. I have a banana in my ear"^* at some point or another.

^* Te audire no possum. Musa sapientum fixa est in aure.