I just got back from a wee trip to Seattle and I am once again glad to live in a place where I can get high speed Internet access - 5Mbps x 1Mbps is what I get at home versus the ~500 Kbps x 30 Kbps that many Seattlites get for the same cost. That and not having to go off and bomb foreign countries to make myself feel better (which is more true of the US administration that much of the population, but still...)
But the Sci Fi museum was cool. Anyone who is any sort of Sci Fi fan should check it out. They have tons of stuff there like set props from Star Trek and portions of manuscripts by Heinlein. It was neeto!
Wednesday, 25 August 2004
Tuesday, 17 August 2004
Software Engineering Crayons
Ah back on the UnRoots Online path. Czak and I have started doing the dev and Wendigo has been in there too. Right now we are using advanced software engineering tools to design the next version of the game. We are using Software Engineering Crayons and Software Engineering Paper. Really high-tech stuff here so let's not get in to the details. Let's just say that the process also involves a lot of Software Engineering Beer as well.
As for my Gentoo explorations, I have been finding portage easy to manage software with and the end results are fairly pleasing. One thing I would be interested to see would be user-space package management. With emerge, I can specify an alternate root directory however it still neeps and nops that it must be run as root for the package installation. An application like Gaim really does not need to be installed as root. Ah well. That's just being picky since none of the package systems I know of allow a user to install software.
By the way, this is the call I make to xterm to get me a purdy xterm with proper PS1 and everything else:
xterm -g 120x50+80+80 -bg black -fg gray -ls
The -ls is the important part. The rest is colours and screen position.
As for my Gentoo explorations, I have been finding portage easy to manage software with and the end results are fairly pleasing. One thing I would be interested to see would be user-space package management. With emerge, I can specify an alternate root directory however it still neeps and nops that it must be run as root for the package installation. An application like Gaim really does not need to be installed as root. Ah well. That's just being picky since none of the package systems I know of allow a user to install software.
By the way, this is the call I make to xterm to get me a purdy xterm with proper PS1 and everything else:
xterm -g 120x50+80+80 -bg black -fg gray -ls
The -ls is the important part. The rest is colours and screen position.
Tuesday, 10 August 2004
Operating Systems and Games
Werd! My Gentoo install is all done. I have IceWM tweaked enough to do all my favorite things (open a shell, browser, xchat, stuff like that) and UT is working. What else is there? Anyhow, it's running fairly well at this point. It takes about 8 seconds to startx... IceWM is definately lightweight.
And, despite all expectations there's a URO round running again. We're running on 5 minute rounds just to be sure that all the version 1 (beta 1?) survived the transistion to PHP5 (and so far it has). I think we're going to schedule a reset and start a new round Friday night.
What's it do? What's it do? Not a crap of a lot. But czak and I are going to hit the drawrin board this weekend and see what needs to be done. Czak said we need to dump the existing version (beta?) 2 code. That sounds like some serious fun...
Anyhow, go see bash.org if you're not already there. It's funny as hell.
And, despite all expectations there's a URO round running again. We're running on 5 minute rounds just to be sure that all the version 1 (beta 1?) survived the transistion to PHP5 (and so far it has). I think we're going to schedule a reset and start a new round Friday night.
What's it do? What's it do? Not a crap of a lot. But czak and I are going to hit the drawrin board this weekend and see what needs to be done. Czak said we need to dump the existing version (beta?) 2 code. That sounds like some serious fun...
Anyhow, go see bash.org if you're not already there. It's funny as hell.
Thursday, 5 August 2004
X this!
Yeah, see about that. Apparently I need to emerge both nvidia-kernel and nvidia-glx. Everything works great now. I just emerged firefox (woo!) so updating my plan in icewm under gentoo. So far, I like it. Definately is going to take me a while to install all the software I want... But I'll get there. Probably just queue up a whole mess of packages and let them run while I sleep.
Anyhow, preliminary reports indicate that this setup is not totaly lame.
Speaking of lame (or "not lame" to be more accurate), I watched the Butterly Fly Effect recently. I had the good fortune to watch the director's cut. The ending for the theatrical release is powerfully weak quite like what happened to Blade Runner.
Anyhow, the protagonist is a bit of a clutz but I thought everyone did an interesting and entertaining job with characters and their interactions.
Anyhow, preliminary reports indicate that this setup is not totaly lame.
Speaking of lame (or "not lame" to be more accurate), I watched the Butterly Fly Effect recently. I had the good fortune to watch the director's cut. The ending for the theatrical release is powerfully weak quite like what happened to Blade Runner.
Anyhow, the protagonist is a bit of a clutz but I thought everyone did an interesting and entertaining job with characters and their interactions.
Monday, 2 August 2004
More Fun with Software
Eh stuff isn't going so smooth. I still haven't been able to get X (either Xfree86 or Xorg) working in Gentoo on Michael. Totaly lame. I can't get my display working using framebuffer or the nvidia drivers. WEAK! I didn't think it would make much of a difference (since the display works fine in knoppix), but the only thing I haven't done is try the normal video plug instead of the DVI. What the what!
That and I'm going ahead and installing Linux on an old box to stand-in as the gateway since that Linksys still fails off and on. It will be fine as a bridge no matter what so I'm going to keep that... Anyhow, I had started with Porcelina. I tried booting from knoppix and it was odd. BIOS would give me the loader but then knoppix would fail to detect the cd drive during init. WTF? So I open the case and realize that the CD drive is actually the primary slave. That's lame so I hook it up as secondary master, cram the second NIC in there while the case is open, press "on" and ... and what? Here's a million dollars? No. Nothing. The PSU fan and mainboard LEDs all come on but CMOS doesn't even beep. CD drive won't open. I push stuff around but that PSU just died... Or something.
Out come the guts and in to Cayce. She boots like the charmer she is. Yay! Up with knoppix, a little fdisk, a little format, and now to load debian. It's a fairly straightforward process, but I keep getting odd DMA errors and stuff. I tried the install several times with slight variations but no love there. I think I just have to sync the drive more often to coax this puppy in to working... Or replace the drive. I hope it's not the controller cause that would be lame.
The one bit of good news is that the upgrade to the full release of PHP5 went well. Compiled without complaint. Reloaded apache and it hasn't crashed since. No complaints about memory unavailable. So far so good. Everyone is to keep an eye on it, spam the uro forums, etc. and let me know if they see errors, but I'm optimistic so far.
Woo! I love sticking forks in my eyes!
That and I'm going ahead and installing Linux on an old box to stand-in as the gateway since that Linksys still fails off and on. It will be fine as a bridge no matter what so I'm going to keep that... Anyhow, I had started with Porcelina. I tried booting from knoppix and it was odd. BIOS would give me the loader but then knoppix would fail to detect the cd drive during init. WTF? So I open the case and realize that the CD drive is actually the primary slave. That's lame so I hook it up as secondary master, cram the second NIC in there while the case is open, press "on" and ... and what? Here's a million dollars? No. Nothing. The PSU fan and mainboard LEDs all come on but CMOS doesn't even beep. CD drive won't open. I push stuff around but that PSU just died... Or something.
Out come the guts and in to Cayce. She boots like the charmer she is. Yay! Up with knoppix, a little fdisk, a little format, and now to load debian. It's a fairly straightforward process, but I keep getting odd DMA errors and stuff. I tried the install several times with slight variations but no love there. I think I just have to sync the drive more often to coax this puppy in to working... Or replace the drive. I hope it's not the controller cause that would be lame.
The one bit of good news is that the upgrade to the full release of PHP5 went well. Compiled without complaint. Reloaded apache and it hasn't crashed since. No complaints about memory unavailable. So far so good. Everyone is to keep an eye on it, spam the uro forums, etc. and let me know if they see errors, but I'm optimistic so far.
Woo! I love sticking forks in my eyes!
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