Software
I figured I'd get Linux running on my P1/MMX laptop just so that I'd have something to carry around while my other laptop is in the clutches of HP Tech Support. Debian 5 now includes LXDE in the main repository, so setting it up is a breeze: apt-get install lxde took care of not only LXDE but the installation and configuration of the entire X server, and I did a net-install so no CD burning was required.
The next order of business didn't go so well: getting Wi-Fi to work acceptably well. This particular laptop has trouble with Plug-and-Play on the...
It feels nice to have some time to spare and catch up on things. I've been quite busy recently, with family, life, work, and school, and the sheer volume of what's been going on had put me off from taking the time to write a blog entry about anything. For those that have kept up with me via e-mail, AIM/iChat, Skype, and the like, bear with me for just a moment.
Things start in mid-April, where I had been working on a series of videos for the senior comedy event at school. This was, more or less, the only time when...
…is out. I’d give it a try, but apparently PS/2 mice and Synaptics trackpads don’t get along well anymore in X. Dear Ubuntu maintainers: this is bad because Windows 7 RC1 releases next week.
If you’re wondering where I’ve been lately, no, I didn’t go to Europe again. That’s off the radar for at least another five years. I’ve just been incredibly busy the past week. There was only one day this week that I got to bed before 1AM, and having kicked my Mountain Dew habit four weeks ago, it goes without saying that I’ve been tired too. The third academic quarter is coming to a close, and of course teachers are rushing to get grades in. In this week alone I ended up plowing through three different model AP exams in...
Is it me, or does this post-install process seem a bit excessive? I took these at the first launch of IE8, so the other five or six steps in the installer itself aren’t included in these ten… I don’t even remember Netscape 6 having this many pestering install dialogs. I'm still wondering what to make of this review just yet. There's definitely been progress made, but in true Microsoft fashion, it seems to just be mostly improvements to technologies already available elsewhere. The unofficial Googlebar extension (the same one I was using way back when with Netscape 7.1, mind...
What do you get when you cross a snowstorm, Web server, webcam, and an ironing board?
At the time of this writing, the storm hasn't started yet. The photos this thing is taking are available over here, updating every five minutes, or at least while it doesn't get too dark for the camera to see anything but it's not updating anymore since it's dark out.
So I think I've kludged together a way around this problem.
Run mbox2eml on my Thunderbird mailbox
Import resulting e-mail files to Windows Mail (aka Outlook Express)
Import Outlook Express e-mail to Outlook 2007
Write a VBA macro in Outlook to open each e-mail, delete all attachments that are HTML copies of the plaintext messages, and finally remove all recipients that aren't my e-mail address, saving each message.
Import the resulting Outlook mail back into Thunderbird and EIS for Palm
...
I greatly admire the Palm OS developers right now. They were able to load phone and interface settings, 57 address book entries, my date book and task list until January, a week and a half of assignment lists, and a couple of backlogged e-mail and SMS messages... into a footprint of just 128kb of memory. Not to mention there's a (much relatively) whopping 8MB of memory available for addressing on this thing. Well done.
In other news, I now hear that the iPhone can run GLQuake... How long until Quake usurps Doom from the position of most-ported reference benchmark game? (Oh,...
In retrospect, buying a couple of CD-RWs and DVD-RWs instead of spindles of record-once media would have been a good idea. I'm in the process of getting rid of some twenty CDs worth of outdated Linux distros (Red Hat 6.2 or Mandrake 8.1, anyone?), expired time-demos (to which we can argue that Microsoft is not being environmentally conscious with Longhorn and Longhorn Server builds that expire), and free trials that I no longer have licenses to.
For the time being I'm going to keep them aside. I have a pile of burnt-out fluorescent light bulbs, dead rechargeable batteries, and the...
I'm trying out the new Firefox 3.1 betas, and noticed this while reading Antony's blog:
Antony's blog has featured CSS3 drop shadows for quite some time now, and if I'm not mistaken, even Konqueror 2 running on my Mandrake 8 (ca. 2001) machine could render them. Seems like the Mozilla guys only recently implemented this particular functionality of CSS3, which I have to say is pretty long overdue at this point.
In all honesty, I have to wonder if the internal politics of the Mozilla development hierarchy are becoming inefficient now that they've gone commercial...
I never thought I'd see the day that my Gmail quota usage spiked to 2%...
If anyone's curious, I'm attempting to distribute my backups should something go terribly wrong. The obvious place to back up all of my e-mail was to Gmail via IMAP.
I'm beginning to realize that HD is like The Matrix. You don't really know high the resolution is until you see it for yourself.
Recently I found myself in the market for a new capture card, as my previous one had developed a rather bizarre habit of resetting every ten minutes. While tapping the input button on the front of it wasn't that big of a deal, restarting VLC after the sudden gap in the feed crashed it turned out to be an ordeal of hitting Ctrl+Alt+Del, ending the process, restarting it, and opening the card as a feed could take...
Earlier this year I installed Linux on my $40 Motorola router. Since then, I've discovered various ways in which this can be beneficial and turn my $40 router into something closer to a $400 Cisco router.
On the performance side, I overclocked the CPU from the stock 200MHz to 216MHz, which gave me a noticeable increase in routing bandwidth: almost 6Mbps, for a total of 18Mbps. If I install a suitable heatsink, I can take the BCM4712 CPU all the way up to 300MHz. Using DNSMasq for DNS forwarding eliminated many of the problems that stemmed from Motorola's firmware, and with...
It looks like the local library system finally ditched their Dialcat installation. For as long as I can remember, the library had maintained a system in which their Dynix-based catalog could be remotely queried by any VT100-compatible terminal emulator. Today, though, I dialed in and found that the number is now out of service, and the library has removed all information concerning the number from their website. Of course, I'm not entirely sure how long the system has been out of commission, since I haven't used it since roughly this time last year.
I suppose I could've seen this coming. Back...
After my previous experience with Firefox 3.0, you'd probably come to think that I wouldn't even bother taking Firefox 3.0 RC1 for a spin. Nonetheless, my curiosity got the best of me, so I went and downloaded the latest build from Vector64. Imagine my surprise when Minefield loaded up with Googlebar and Adblock Plus clearly functioning as they should! ChatZilla and DOM Inspector appear to be in working order once again as well.
Firefox's new theme is still terrible, except this time around I managed to force a recreation of the Firefox 2 theme onto Firefox 3 with a simple RDF...
Driven mainly by the under-the-hood rendering improvements and the availability of a substantially more recent x64 build, I decided to give Firefox 3.0 another try today. Oh boy.
Compatibility problems are still running rampant throughout my Firefox 3 install. I managed to fix the some of my issues through unofficial updates, hacking around with Firefox's RDF control files, and in the case of the classic and self-preferred Googlebar, turning to underpowered alternatives. DOM Inspector isn't an optional component anymore, and I can't seem to install it directly from the "Firefox Add-Ons" page, so I assume I'm going to have to go...
It seems that I've become a bit lax with the blog. Plenty's happened over the past week and a half, though I honestly haven't had the motivation to write any entries lately.
I finished Halo 2 a bit over a week ago. Obviously, Halo 2 is a sequel - and that dismayed me somewhat at first. There have been many attempted game series that couldn't survive a sequel, let alone two or three, notable exceptions including the classics (Mario, Zelda, StarFox, and so forth). Halo 2, impressively, managed to get things right in this regard.
One of the first things you'll notice...
Here's a list that's been steadily growing in my Documents folder for the past year and a half:
Desktop hard drive > 1.5gb
120gb PATA desktop hard drive
Laptop power supply, 19v 2.93A (~60 watt)
128MB SmartMedia Flash Card
3 PS/2 to SDL cables
ATX case
USB floppy drive
Internal floppy drive or CD drive
Neoya X2VGA2
PS2 component video cable
Gamecube digital component video cable (not...
I suppose it's a well-known fact that large communities such as schools and cubicle-departments are disease incubators. It only takes one to spread something to an entire class; that class can easily pass it to another floor, and before long there's a large-scale outbreak. This school year, I managed to escape two outbreaks of strep throat and one of laryngitis, along with a particularly nasty strain of whooping cough (for which I was identified as a possible infectee and carrier, and thus had to take azithromycin for a week anyway).
On Friday, it seemed that my luck had run out, just...
My friend and I just bet each other $50 that one of us will uninstall Windows Vista and revert to Windows XP within six months' time. What do you suppose I should make of this, other than the fact that I'm hard-pressed for cash?
In other news, my GPA for the last semester was 3.769, so I suppose at the very least I haven't gone completely stupid yet.