I don't usually post political journals, but I ran into an idiot on some forums today who posted a link to some anti-Bush crap, and I replied with this:

I'm John Fugging Kerry, and don't you forget it. I went to Vietnam! I'm going to raise taxes. I went to Vietnam! Americans don't care about terrorism, they care about the price of health care. I went to Vietnam! If you vote for Bush, you're f--king up! I went to Vietnam! Bush f--ked up! I went to Vietnam! I voted for the 87 billion before I voted against it. I went to Vietnam! I didn't throw my medals, they were ribbons, no, they were somebody else's medals, leave me alone, I went to Vietnam! I commited war crimes and I'm a f--king hero. I went to Vietnam! This is my wife. I went to Vietnam! She says Bush & Cheney & Ashcroft are the "Asses of Evil". I went to Vietnam! My website is/was covered with articles containing the words "f--k" & "s--t"! I went to Vietnam! In '92 I said that serving in Vietnam should not be an election issue, but I keep lying about Bush's National Guard service and trying to turn it into an election issue. I went to Vietnam!

You want to vote for that corpse? A guy who lies as much as Clinton but can't keep his story straight? Please! Hell, Nader's probably a better canidate.

(Isn't that a dramatic title?)

I installed BIND on behemoth (my p90), initially as caching-only, and then I added a zone for my LAN. Seems to work well, but it sure doesn't make it easy to tell what's wrong when it doesn't work.

I was messing with Smackintosh (Performa 575) last night and must have shocked the mobo or something, as it's quite dead now. I removed all the parts, and now I have to get rid of the case (which has the CRT in it). Oh well, I didn't really use it much anyway. I'm going to get a PowerPC-based performa from my friend... it's a "road apple" (slow, badly designed), but perhaps I'll find a use for it.

Y'know, I don't think they're putting Kerry's botox in the right place... he's still in every position on every issue.

Did you hear? George W. Bush is going back to school. He's going to learn how to say, "nuclear".

Bill Clinton's going back to school too, but for a different reason. I'd tell you what his motivation is, but that would be below the belt.

Isn't that last one just awful? -JDWTopGuy

Finally! Stats are back. Yay!

A new, smaller version of my .sig name printer is available here. 131 characters. (I removed the #include statement... it will compile without it, at least with GCC.)

Okay, so I'm helping a friend with her computer today. She has the tendency to somehow get a bunch of blank lines in the header of her Word documents, and of course when that happens I have to fix it.

So me, I sez to my self I sez, "Why not make a macro, stick it in the menu and then she can fix it herself!" A brilliant idea, so I record the macro. Easy as cheesecake. Then I go Tools->Customize and drag the macro to the Tools menu, rename it "Remove Header", and ta-da. I'm done, right?

So I go through a ton of her files and use the macro to fix the ones that need fixing. So far, so good.

Then I quit Word and restart it so I can show her how to do it... and the menu item is nowhere to be found. I tried a ton of things and I simply couldn't get the stupid menu item to stick.

I hate Word.

Life without distributed.net stats is horrible.

Anyway, I'm now working on version 2.0 of my C perproxy stats script... it will take the place of the other versions and will do a lot more.

Griping: Every time I read or watch the news, they always have to talk about "Ze Gay Homos!". Well I'm tired of hearing about the gay homos, damnit!

Updates: There is now a dnetc .489 prerelease for Linux/x86. Yay! I figured out how to do reverse DNS lookups in C, so now I can finish my C port of my dnet perproxy stats CGI script. Double yay!!

Okay... first, griping: Why is the linux/x86 distributed.net client almost a year old? There have been plenty of x86 fixes and two new x86 cores, but the linux/x86 client has not been updated. And this ticks me off because it means I have to run windows in order to crunch as fast as possible on my Athlon XP. (On the plus side, the latest windows client has a core (SGP-3) which is the fastest on my Pentium w/MMX. Yay!)

Next... whining: Dialup stinks! Liberals are annoying! John Kerry is ugly!

Finally, Yadda: I'm starting on some factoring code using GMP. I want to factor RSA-640. I always seem to start new projects even though I have old ones that need finishing/fixing/updating.

Panther is the most unstable release of Mac OS X that I've ever used. It's nice, but not only does it have more application crashes than Jaguar, it also has more kernel panics. I can reliably cause either a panic or an application crash by playing 4x4 Evo2. Apparently there's something rotten in the OpenGL code or graphics driver.

I ported my distributed.net perproxy stats script from REBOL to python, and I'm working on a perl port. REBOL is good, python is good, perl is ugly. I'm thinking about C and PHP ports next.

Here's the REBOL version on Zoplionah.com.

Note to self: Create webpage for stats script, add GPL crud, link.

Over 3,000 RC5 work units this month. :D

673 work units submitted today. #652 in the daily ranking.

Oh yeah, I overclocked my 166MHz Pentium to 180MHz.

Evo2 Think Tank back up... thanks JM!

I am in distributed.net heaven.

Six machines, two of them G4s. My PowerBook is running at 6.97 Mkeys/sec, up from 6.85 Mkeys/sec. My iBook is doing 9.7 Mkeys/sec. My Athlon XP box, which I bumped up by about 50MHz (bus @ 138MHz) is doing about 4.7 Mkeys/sec. (Once distributed.net releases clients with the new athlon core, that will increase.)

In short, I'm doing about 20 Mkeys/sec without moving an inch.

I just got Scott Mueller's Upgrading and Reparing PCs, 15th anniversary edition. This is one huge book. Lots of info, looks like a good read.

Update V-day: My 166MHz Pentium w/MMX is now running smoothly at 200MHz. I stuck a case fan on top of the heatsink just to be safe. :P

Not right now! It's offline.
Yo! Telnet to 172.210.74.129 (and bring it up in your browser)!

Behemoth is playing games!

I'm glad I don't watch the superbowl.

Anyway, my buddy's driving over to pick up the PB (and deliver payment) on saturday. Me not having the PB back yet is a minor detail.

I'm going to attempt to secure behemoth to the point where I can create a "demo" account and post the IP here. Granted, it'll be slow as heck, but I want to try it. "fortune" and "adventure" will be available, and maybe a few other things. If I can do it this weekend, I'll leave it online overnight.

We'll see.

I plan on building a PC in the (very sturdy) cardboard box my iBook came in. It's a nice box; it even has a handle, so I'll have a portable PC. w00t!

Granted, it's going to be a used P2, but hey. My plan is to buy one of those cheap $30 cases with a 300 watt PSU. The PSU goes in the cardboard box, and my 90MHz pentium moves into the case.

Why would I move my 90MHz pentium? It's not called "behemoth" just because it's slow. See? That case has plenty of expansion room, but it's all steel... which makes for a very sturdy, very heavy, very LOUD case.

I also intend to pack a few more (low-capacity) hard drives into behemoth and share them via samba. After this PITA with the PowerBook I intend to back up my junk more often.

Speaking of which, my PB hasn't arrived yet even though Apple's site shows that it shipped out on the 26th. I suspect it's because of the weather.

After five days of torturous life without a computer, I'm finally back online. Allow me to explain.

Wednesday evening, my PowerBook got in touch with its pyromaniac side. Yes, my PowerBook G4 set itself on fire. Luckily I was there and there was no serious damage to anything (except the PB, and it wasn't too bad). I'm glad I have AppleCare on it. So Thursday my PowerBook made its way to Texas to get repaired. According to Apple's online system, it was shipped back today, and should arrive tomorrow.

My torture has been stopped not by the return of my PowerBook, but by the extremely late arrival of my new iBook G4. I'm never ordering from MacMall again.

First impressions of my new iBook:

• It's thick.
• It's much quieter than my PowerBook, almost silent.
• It's also much cooler than my PB.
• Keyboard is nice.
• I can live with the screen.

I benchmarked it at 9.8 million keys/sec on RC5-72, but it's generally a bit slower than that. It may have to do with running dnetc in OS X's Terminal.app. I usually run it in rxvt, which is faster, but as this is a new system I haven't yet installed X Windows/Fink/etc.

I'm waiting for my PB to get back before I go mucking around with all the usual programs (Mail, iCal, etc.) because I want to copy my data from the PB first.