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.

Well this is weird... I'm currently running a distributed.net client on somebody else's open OpenVMS system.

Don't believe me? Free shell access to an OpenVMS cluster (2 machines).

It remains to be seen if they'll get pissed off. But they allow hacking (or at least attempted hacking) of their own machines, so I don't see why they'd mind me running a dnetc client. :P

FYI, I have an account on grex (cyberspace.org) as well. I also had an account on JM Apocalypse's box... you wanna recreate my account? I'd like to get my forums back up.

If I had broadband I'd give a few of my /. fans accounts on behemoth, but I don't.

In other news, I wrote a fork-bomb (a very simple fork-bomb) and my PIDs are getting close to 27K, in only 2 days of uptime.

I am an absolute idiot. A fool. A moron, a klutz, a dork!

Okay, here's what happened: I submitted a patch to FreeVMS. Except that I never got FreeVMS to compile correctly and boot, patched or unpatched.

So I submitted a screwed-up patch. And now the FreeVMS guy probably thinks I'm some clueless idiot, and he's right.

Excuse me while I smack myself. *smack*

*smack* *smack*

Now I'm going to go hang my head in shame, and fix my patch. If you don't hear from me, I've probably hung myself with an ethernet cable.

And it's still valid C! Thanks to my anonymous helper, plus some more experimenting on my own... the practically sig-sized JDWTopGuy.c (165 characters):

#include <stdio.h>
int main(){char c=0,x[]={37,34,43,1,42,55,1,56,35,1,58,1,60,1};while(printf("%c"+((c<14)?0:2),((x[++c]==1)?1:0)+(x[c]*2)));printf("\n");return 0;}

Obviously slashdot is messing with it, everything past the include should be on one line. BTW, this version prints "JDWTopGuy", not "JDWTOPGUY".

I haven't had a chance to test it on an linux box, but it compiles fine with gcc 3.1 on Mac OS X 10.2.8.

Ahh! I finally submitted my patch to FreeVMS. Twice, actually. :P I accidentally included a screwed-up change in the first patch I sent.

Luckily the dude I sent it to was hip to the bad mojo, and I did a kind of snip-snip thang, and sent him a groovy new patch, daddy-o.

I have no idea what I just said. Anyway, my "little" patch was 887 lines long, with 26,564 characters. It eliminates a ton of compile-time warnings when compiling FreeVMS. (Several thousand lines of warnings, last time I checked.)

Err, whatever. How was your new years eve? Mine was boooring.

My old JE was getting stale (yes, I hadn't written one since last year, har har), so I decided to write a new one.

I should be getting my iBook before the end of the month. Which means I'll also get another PC, as part of the sale of my PowerBook.

I'm seriously considering making a case for my "new" PC out of these cardboard boxes I have... it'd be free, and better quality than those $30 cases online... I do need a PSU though.

Oh yeah, I have set a personal record... this win98SE box has been up for 7 days, 21 hours, and change. And yes, I've been using it... a lot. I've played Descent (DOS-based), Snood, run dnetc, used Firebird, AIM, and PuTTY. I've also connected and disconnected from network shares and stuff.

Woohoo.

The boredom meter was hitting dangerous levels again, so I turned the C program I posted in my last JE into a self-compiling, self-running program.

Basically, wrote a simple bash script that extracts the C program from itself (tail -n 17 $0 > tmp.c), then compiles the program, removes the temporary file, and runs the C program.

Isn't that thrilling?

You know you wanna try it... go ahead. It's C, should compile fine with any C compiler.

#include <stdio.h>
 
int main() {
  char x[] = { 37,34,43,1,42,39,1,40,35,1,42,1,44,1 };
  int c;
 
  for( c = 0; c < 14; c++ ) {
    if( x[c + 1] == 1 )
      printf( "%c", ( ( ( x[c] * 2 ) ) + x[++c] ) );
    else
      printf( "%c", ( x[c] * 2 ) );
  }
 
  printf( "\n" );
 
  return 0;
}

(Yes, this is how bored I am.)

Ahh. For some reason I keep thinking how funny it would be to sing "I'm dreaming of a white Kwanzaa". Get it? A "white" kwanzaa?

Anyway, I got $130, chocolate, the spider-man game for PC, and a remote control Mini Cooper. I also had a glass of grape juice spilled on me (and it wasn't my fault).

That mini cooper is awesome, it's incredibly fast and it's a huge scale. I'm not sure what the scale is, but it's bigger than 1:6.

I have a hard decision to make. I'm replacing my PowerBook in the next month or so. I should have about $2,000 to spend. Do I buy a dual 1.25 GHz PowerMac G4, or do I stick with the iBook/PowerBook? I would like to have the PowerMac for its power and SuperDrive, but I do like to take my computer to friends' houses. What do you think?