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.

Finally I got that old-timer laptop up and running with Linux. I even managed to get X11 working. Not with 430C configuration I found earlier, but with this, which is designed to work with 400C laptop. Both models have the same graphics chip, so there shouldn't be a much difference. But for some reason, the "older" one works better. Oh well, I don't care as long as everything works as assumed.

Damn, it can sometimes be hard to install Linux. Or any other operating system.

These days, everybody seems to assume that a CD-ROM drive is in every possible machine on the earth. That damned Compaq, I mentioned yesterday, doesn't happen to have one and I have to try to install Linux by hand to it. So far, I have tried to install Slackware 8.1, NetBSD 1.6.0, OpenBSD 3.2 and even AtheOS, but without any success. Actually, OpenBSD was the only one, which I was able to install and configure using just one floppy disk.

Installation of the OpenBSD is one of the smoothest things, I have seen in the non-Microsoft world. But I wasn't able to set up X11 correctly, so back to square one.

Now, I'm installing a Slackware 7.1 using a floppy disk and a network connection. Well, I had to modify the installation process quite heavily, because Slackware doesn't support installation over FTP and I'm not yet fetched all the installation packages, but all in all, everything seems to be working fine.

After booting the Slackware installation, I had to extract and copy dhclient and all relevant accessories and wget to get started with the process. And I had to modify dhclient script to get Internet connection working. Thank god, wget is so smart that it can fetch files recursively. Now I'm just waiting that downloading finishes up.

Installing Slackware 7.1 to this old piece of shi^W joy is possible. Thanks to the wonders of modern Internet, I was able to find proof about it. The page also provides a ready-made XF86Config file for my laptop.

Aah... there is nothing so lovely than the smell of a vintage hardware... Except, the fine smell of a new hardware, of course.

Last night I was having a dinner with my friends and got an old Compaq Contura 430C laptop. The machine is really old. It's an i486 with 32 MB RAM and 700 MB hard drive. The laptop includes some weird pcmcia network card, but fortunately Linux recognizes it as a NE2000 card. So, now I have an old laptop in my hands waiting to get a Linux installed. The real problem will be an X11 installation, because these old Compaqs have some strange Western Digital graphics chip, which will be erroneously detected as a Cirrus Logic chip.

The whole point having an old-timer laptop up an running as a secondary workstation (the battery is dead, so I'm dependent on electric wall socket) is that it is a great feeling to turn a piece of worthless junk to useful piece of hardware.

Sometimes I'm tired of living in a city. At the last weekend I had to listen a drunken neighbor having a party at his apartment. Fortunately they stopped at the midnight, before I had to interfere the situation or call the police.

Now I'm considering taking some actions and - perhaps - dropping some dog shit to his mailbox. Or not. I haven't made up my mind yet. And I don't have a dog. So, I'm kind of short of a supply.

It's good to have something therapeutic to read. In every bad situation, there should be Something Positive to read about :) Something Positive is quite harsh comic. But it makes you feel better if life is kicking you to head.

Anyway. My neighbor isn't the only thing I hate about cities. In general, cities are cool place to live, but I'm not the most social kind of person, so I end up hating all the unthoughtful and rude people I have to confront every day at the downtown. It's amazing, when a large amount of people gathers to the same place (at the department store, for example), they suddenly forget all manners and start acting like jerks. It's a hell to try to do some shopping while bunch of egomaniac zombies are rushing around and making even breathing difficult.

Maybe I should move to the countryside, buy a house and have a broadband connection and start telecommuting.

Maybe someday...

Well, this is a start. I actually have never kept a journal before and I don't have a clear picture, what to write here. I have written some thoughts to various web sites (web logs) before, but I haven't had my very own journal before. So, this would be my place to talk about my stuff.

Some would argue that if the Slashdot is the right place to keep a journal, but I happen to be a regular Slashdot reader and it would be convenient to keep the journal at the same place where I'll spend most of my on-line time anyway (Yes, I'm a news junkie).

If someone accidentally reads this journal, please note, that English isn't my mother tongue. There will be some grammatical errors and I can't help them. I'm trying to learn to write better English, but the learning doesn't happen overnight.