bejiitas_wrath's Journal: Tsunami

There has just been an 8.7 magnitude Earthquake in the sea of Sumatra. The previous quake that caused the boxing day Tsunami was 9.6 on the Richter scale. People are rightfully scrambling for higher ground and their was a 10cm swell rcorded in the water. Closer to the tremor, it would have been a little higher. I hope there are not fatalities this time, the last wave killed about 300.000 people. The latest quake struck at around 11:15 pm local time and lasted about three minutes. The epicentre of the earthquake is near the epicentre of the previous Boxing day earthquake on December 26. Hundreds of buildings on an Indonesian island near the earthquake have been destroyed and it is believed that dozens of people have been buried in the rubble. Tsunami warnings have been issued in Madagascar and the island of Maritius following the earthquake. People in Bandah Acheh are fleeing to higher ground and nervously watching the sea for any sign of rising water.

-- Sky News.Sky News Website.

I have just got my Networking working! I have connected my Debian laptop to my Mandrake Linux 10.0 desktop server via Crossover cable and I have been able to connect at last!. The problem was that I did not set up each machine's IP addresses and hostnames in the /etc/hosts file so they would not allow each other to connect. I prefer to use this method, since I can restrict connections to machines I know about. I reconfigured the firewall on the server to accept telnet and http connections and I was done! Using telnet is fine for the moment, I would not do it over the Internet though. Pleased as punch I was when I worked it out, but I should have been able to do this sooner I was just not thinking of the simplest thing, instead I was stuffing around with ifconfig and netstat trying to debug the network, when it was the permissions that were the problem. I installed the Windows driver for my NetGear fa411 Ethernet card and got it to work perfectly using Debian GNU/Linux 3.1. Now I have nothing to bitch about. I can use su to switch to the root user and run administration tasks from my Laptop, without having to go near the server at all. Now I am very happy.

I even played a game of prboom over the network and there was of course almost no latency even with the telnet and httpd servers running as well. What else do you expect from a 100MB connection with crossover cable.

Just uploaded Nexus of Evil and Uac Hangar to the Idgames archives. Should be on /newstuff soon... I have re-coded my viewblog CGI script to use a new codebase I wrote over the Christmas break, it now uses all of the CGI.pm features and is much simpler to use, I got rid of the localtime() vs gmtime() crap from the menu and made it much simpler to run and use.

I have also coded an excellent Perl Guestbook script. This script uses CGI.pm and works very well on Apache 1.3. I am testing the script on Debian and it is performing incredibly well. I have also downloaded the Zdoom .96 source code and I am going to build this on Debian. I have got the files patched and I just need the SDL Development packages installed to compile this game and then I will be very happy indeed. Most of the people compiling it use Gentoo, which is fair enough but I prefer Debian anyday. I wonder though, if you had modplug installed could you use it to play the Unreal umx music files in wads? Anyway, I like how the obj files are built in their own directory and they can be removed by deleting the directory. This is better than building them in the same directory as the source. This keeps everything neat and tidy. I have libsdl1.2 so that should be enough, and FMOD3.74. It was nice of the person who packaged up the source to provide some include files with the source to make it easier on the end user.

If only Yadex had Zdoom support, I guess I could finish the Hexen side of the code and put in full Zdoom support. Yadex is after all the best editor for Doom, being easy to use and fast. I have loaded the consoledoom.wad with Doom2.wad to work with the textures and the editor shows the custom sprites! Very good indeed. Now that UAC Hangar and Nexus of Evil are in the IdGames archive I can concentrate on other things. I have been considering making a level like E3M1 but much larger, maybe using some of those skin and metal textures from PSX Doom. It would look very PSX-Like but would be more detailed and very cool indeed, I might call it skin city ;).

And what about the woman who found a finger in her Chilli at Wendy's. Are they using dead people to make their food now? This is surely the last time I eat there, although I consider Hungry Jack's a safer bet. Their Grilled Chicken is very nice. And incredibly filling too. How cool is it that John Cena was able to keep his cool on WWE Smackdown on 27-03-05. JBL was taunting him and ended up spraypainted and humilliated. And the Big Show overturning a 4400 Pound truck, that was the most awsome moment on Smackdown ever, even better than when the Undertaker chokeslammed someone and they went through the mat.

My desktop machine is running a cron job, so I better use the laptop for a while. What with having to regenerate makewhatis and all, I do not mind leaving it to it's own devices for a while. If only Windows could have automated system administration. Oh, wait it is finished now. Oh well. Just made a quick map for strolling. I have put in hordes of monsters and long corridors and the key is to get from one end of the corridor to the other without dying. There are 768 monsters in only 3 corridors and yet I can finish it strolling/pacifist! Very cool.

I was reading an old post on slashdot, and there was a guy who was claiming that Microsoft Internet Explorer is no less secure or stable than Firefox and Mozilla. This is the browser that any script kiddy can hack and can be crashed with only 11 bytes of code! What a heap of shit!Mozilla Website.Get a better browser here. Much better than IE. I remember once I was using Windows '98 to browse the Web and I got a dialler program that tried to re-dial my modem to a number in Vanuatu. what a joke Windows is if it let's this happen. Of course the program was downloaded through IE without my knowledge. I wonder how many people have had this happen, quite a few I bet, I am not stupid enough to have that happen to me of course. Debian is not conducive to such things very easily.

About the Terri Shiavo case featured on Fox News, I am wondering about the poor lady, who cannot speak for herself and has no say in proceedings at all, I am sure she wants to maybe end her life, but she cannot exactly tell them what she wants can she? I hope there is some resolution in this case and they can come to some agreement on what should happen. But letting her starve to death is a form of torture and should not happen in this day and age. Give her some water! In a few years they may even be able to help her condition.