... or why the hacking skills are essential for the survive of the human race... or something.

I bought a Magic Star MP3 player in February as I bragged about some time ago. The player worked pretty well. However, it sometimes formatted itself.

Finally I was able to bring the player to the store where I bought it. I got a replacement player and got back home. Because I don't have a car, I had to use public transportation to get to the store. It cost me six euros (six dollars) to get there and back.

The f*cking player doesn't work at all! For some reason it's unable to load the li-ion battery. So, now I have to travel back to the store and pay another six euros because of it. For the record, the price of the player was 100 euros when I bought it and now it costs only 80 euros. And I'll have to spend extra 12 euros to get a working version of that damned device. So, basically I've spent 112 euros to the device which now costs over 30 euros less :(

F*uck!

And now to the topic. Hacking skills - and now I mean the real hacking skills, not any "|\/|4d h4x0r 5k1LLz" or skript kiddie things or anything related with computers for that matter - are essential in this kind of situation. With the ability to tinker with electronic devices and to get them working reliably is one of the most valued skills in modern society in my opinion. Now I have to travel and spend money just because I'm too wimpy to try to fix the device myself. Any kind of tampering will void the warranty and I'm sure that I can't fix the device without leaving clear marks to the wiring or to the case.

After long, long time I decided to test Wine. I grabbed the latest source code, compiled it and installed with the script provided by the package.

Wine is one amazing piece of a software engineering work. Unfortunately I have been able to run only one game so far under the Wine. But what game... Unreal. The game that I was barely able to run under the Windows 98. It works perfectly under the Wine. Even the sound effects work. The game play is flawless under the 1024x768 resolution.

I'm not able to play SimCity 3000 or Fallout 2 and that's the big minus. Not entirely a minus for Wine but for the game developers who create weird code with some custom hooks to the underlying system.

The only things which seem to work almost perfectly are setup programs. For example Install Shield setup will work nicly with Wine. Wine even offers uninstall.exe/uninstaller.exe tool for having a replacement for Add/Remove panel which can be used to run uninstallers.

Apparently the latest version of the Wine is a tool which deserves more examination and experimentation. Who knows, maybe I'll be able to play SimCity under the Linux some day...

Update:

I got Fallout 2 working. I had to install a patch provided by Blackisle. Only thing NOT working right now is keyboard. I can't give descriptions to game saves :(

I got today a new heat sink. Cooler Master HHC-L61 Heat Pipe. It kicks ass! Silent, beautiful, efficent and well finished. And expensive :( But, Wow, it's cool. Literaly. It can achieve same results as cheaper heat sinks but with much lower noise level. The sink is made of copper and has two heat pipes sitcking from the side of the sink. At the top of the sink sits a 60mm fan. The promised noise level is 26 dB. And, well, I think that it's as silent as promised. However, I can't be sure because I actually can't hear the damn thing. Now the harddrive is keeping too much noise :)

Slackware 9.0 was released last week. And at the last weekend, I installed it to my "production machine".

Slackware 9.0 is nice. But not as polished as 8.1 was. Some annoyances are still around (even more than in the 9.0rc1 which I installed to my old-timer laptop).

The worst thing in this release are fonts under Mozilla 1.3. I had to switch to Gnome just because I was unable to tweak anti-aliasing settings for Mozilla (which is a GTK+-application) under the KDE environment.

To my surprise, Gnome is pretty mature nowadays. Last time checked it, it was buggy and slow and I was unable to make any changes to the default settings without crashing the whole thing. This newest version (ver. 2.2 I suppose) seems to be pretty stable and it's well polished and clean. Older versions had quite a lot of garbage (duplivated featured, useless applets etc.) but this version seens to be spartan enough for my taste.

But the best thing in this new release is the ability to upgrade the whole system from 8.1 to 9.0 without reinstalling everything.

Ah... I'm too tired to check spelling. If the text is unreadable, then just deal with it.

The company I'm working for has an HTTP proxy with censoring. It's very annoying.

I have to give credit to that person who has come up with this idea of multiply checks (the proxy checks for single words, content and URLs). It's pain in the ass and ruins legitimate surfing efficiently.

There seems to be (at least) three stages of checks made to the pages:

First, the proxy checks if the URL is prohibited. If it is, then the banner telling that the page is "illegal" is loaded instead of the page. I cannot figure out any way to bypass this without outside help. When I have to reach this kind of a page, I have to create an SSH tunnel between the university and my work computer to get the page loaded.

Second, the proxy checks all contents of the requested page. If the page contains questionable words then the proxy will replace those words with "----" mark. If there seems to be too many of these words, the whole page is censored out and the banner telling about "prohibited words" is loaded.

Third, if the page seems to be clean but there is some special words at some place of the page then the rest of the page is censored out and the banner is placed there where the first occurrence of the "prohibited word" has been found.

The second and third cases are surprisingly easy to bypass. Just reload the page ten times and the proxy will allow the page to be loaded.

By the way, the proxy server in question is made by Symantec. And for my opinion, the server sucks. It can't handle moderate load efficiently, it just starts to generate "proxy errors". And under heavy load, the server crashes.

I think I have a problem.

Slackware 9.0 RC1 was annouced monday and for some totally unknown reason I just had to install it to my Oldtimer.

What kind of a sick obsession forces a human being to reinstall a whole operation system to a machine, which doesn't even have a cd-rom drive? I think I'll need some professional help or something.

The worst thing is that I did the installation literally last night. I was able to go to the bed at 2 AM. Now I think that I'm going to fall asleep in my cubicle. I hope that no one can ear me snore...

"Blogging"... I wonder, what is the difference between this journal and weblogs. At least I'm trying to keep this as a diary or a journal (or is it same thing? I'm not aware of the differece between these two words).

Some sources state that the term "weblog" means that the owner of the 'blog writes entries about current events and publishes interesting links to various web sites. Well, what I have seen lately in several weblogs haven't been anything news-related or even remotely interesting. It seems that people just rant about different kinds of blogging applications or web sites or blogging in general. It's odd to read stuff about weblogs day after day. Doesn't these people have anything more interesting in their minds? Do they only think about weblogs? Is it some kind of a drug, which seduces you and after a while you can't talk about anything else than 'blogging?

Oh, well.

However, there seems to be one weblog, which is refreshing and quite nice to visit daily basis. Kasia in a nutshell. It has some pretty pictures and quite insightful log entries.

There seems to be two other radio shows in the Internet: Brain Damage (archived material 1991-1995, the show was aired from 1988 to 1995) and Off the Wall, which is a brand new show. Both shows are hosted by the same man, Emmanuel Goldstein (known as Eric Corley in the Brain Damage), who is also behind the show Off the Hook.

It seems that I'm not going to run out of listening material in a long time...

OK, now I have an MP3 Player / Pen Drive thingie and it's quite cool. However, there seems to be a serious flaw in this Pen Drive design. If I repeatedly insert and remove the drive from the USB channel, the drive will format itself. It's quite strange, the file systems disappears and I have to repartition and reformat the whole thing.

I read some information about this kind of devices and it seems that it is not advicable to insert and remove the device often. But I think that this kind of "magical limitation" (no-one says how long the period between the removal and the insertion has to be) is dangerous, because USB devices seem to have this "feature" that the inserted device isn't always identified. So, natural thing to do in this kind of situation is to remove the device and replug it back in. And that seems to be a bad thing.

Well, that's something I just have to try to live with, I think.

update: It seems that when the USB device and the computer cover touches each other, the difference in currencies kills the player. I'm speechles.

I just finished filing episodes from 1988 to 1999 of Off the Hook radio show to CDs. For some reason, the show is extremely addictive. To be honest, this show was the reason why I ordered an mp3 player last week.

Which reminds me... where the heck is the player, anyway? The web store, where I ordered the player, normally ships merchandise in one or two days. Now it's fifth day and I haven't heard anything about my order. Weird.

If someone actually reads this journal and knows some other radio shows like Off the Hook, which can be downloaded in mp3 format, I'd be pleased to hear about them.

My body has betrayed me. I haven't been able to drink coffee in past three months. My stomach just can't handle it any more, I think. And I just love the taste of a good cup of coffee :(

At the last weekend, I drank a cup of coffee as an experiment. What an effect it has on me! My hands was shaking and sweating and I had a hard time to concentrate anything. I felt like I was smoking a cigarette after a long time or I was drunk. At least my stomach didn't seen to mind at all. It handled the drink quite well actually.

Caffeine can't cause this kind of symptoms, because I've used to drink quite a lot of Pepsi Max and tea. It has to be something else. I just can't imagine, what it could be...

Oh well, it seems that I have to drop coffee drinking completely and try to find inspiration from tea drinking.

Oh boy, oh boy, oh joy! I just ordered an mp3 player.

This toy caught my attention. The manufacturer promises compatibility with Linux. This is the only mp3 player so far that I have seen to provide an official support for Linux. I just had to get this. Unfortunately the postal service doesn't deliver mail at weekends. I can hardly wait to have this little treasure.

Yes, I'm a bit excited. I have wanted to own an mp3 player a long time and finally I can afford one. And if that thing works under Linux as promised, I'll be delighted.

For some unknown reason, all employees in our company are forced to use clock cards. It's against our contract, but unfortunately the situation is "My way, or the highway" (hope the phrase is right). If the arrangement isn't satisfying you, then you can quit. So, I think, we just have to live with it.

Well, on friday I clocked out over two hours earlier than was permitted and this morning I overslept and came two ours later to the office. So, now I'm about four hours behind of the regulated working hours. Damn the company, damn the clock card. I have two options: either I can sit here until 8pm and I'll be home at 9:30pm or I can boldly walk out of here at 4pm and try to fill missed time later.

Urge to give a finger to the whole company and clock out early is too tempting...

I gave a second chance to the Netscape 4.73, which came with the Slackware 7.1 and while it's terribly slow, it's the most usable web browser so far. Buggy as a hell, slow as a snail and user interface is quite terrible in 640x480 mode, but for now, there isn't anything better.

It's surprisingly hard to find a suitable web browser for this old laptop. Right now I'm using Netscape 3.04 but it can't handle JavaScript very well. Newer versions of Netscape are too slow to be usable. Opera crashes after few minutes of intensive surfing and Phoenix is so slow that it makes me cry.

I tried to find something - anything - with Google but only came up with some useless non-SSL capable browsers or some Mozilla-offsprings, which will be as slow as Phoenix is.

There has to be a browser capable to handle SSL, JavaScript, frames, HTML 4.1, and so on and be as light-weight as possible. But I just can't find any. What kind of browsers are embedded devices using? They can't be more powerful than this old i486 or can they?

I just realized that without the Open Source, I wouldn't have been able to install a Linux to my machine, because of the modifications I had to make to dhclient script and ability to interfere the Slackware installation process, so I had a chance to mount the hard drive and download all packages after formatting the drive, but before starting the actual package installation process.

I wonder, would this kind of installation process be possible with Windows... I doubt.