well that was easy to set up once i figured out that the smb ip it was asking for was the ip of the computer i wanted to access the network shares on. now i just need to figure out how to get the n64 emulator to recognize my roms and also set up a more permanent network connection.

turns out the problem was that the router was denying the xbox because i didn't tell it to allow the mac address. once i did that i got an ip on the xbox and was able to ftp to it. i've since upgraded xbmc and also copied over a couple roms (may as well also use the xbox as a super nintendo).

i still need a more permanent solution for connecting the xbox to the network, but at least i've made it this far! i'll be looking into playing movies through xbmc off a network share soon.

the wife bought me an xbox since i made a website for the animal shelter she works for. i wanted it mostly for the xbox media center, but i heard you could also play some games on it.

as of now i've bought and installed a white duox2 modchip, flashed the bios on the modchip with evox m8 plus, and used slayer's auto-installer to get xbmc (and some other stuff) installed.

i have a bunch of cdr media with various stuff that i was expecting to be able to play on the xbox through xbmc, but the xbox doesn't want to read them. it's got an ethernet port though, so i grabbed my longest ethernet cables and connected the xbox to my router in the other room (it was barely long enough!) i messed with the network settings and set everything to the router's ip, except i chose a different ip in the same subnet for the xbox to use. the other computers that connect through the router just let the router give them an ip, and i think i have the xbox set to do that too.

no matter what i did on the xbox it still told me its ip address was 0.0.0.0, but now that i think about it i have mac address filtering turned on at the router. i thought that was only for wireless connections, but maybe it's everything. i'll try that but if that doesn't do it then i'm going to need to find some documentation explaining all these network settings.

well i was playing around with redhat, but i just got zelda majora's mask and star wars rogue squadron for my n64 . . . so i'm probably not going to be doing as much with the computer for a while (just started zelda). as a side note, i completed the ocarina of time a year or so ago. as another side note, i was decided between starfox and rogue squadron (both were the same price) -- did i make the right choice?

sorry this is so long, but here goes:

i finally got around to installing redhat 9 on one of my computers again, and this time it's my main one. i still have windows xp on it as i don't know all that much about using linux yet. here are some details on my setup:

i have a 20-gig hard drive with a 15-gig fat32 partition for xp (that linux has access to, of course) and the rest for linux--swap, root (/ not /root), and i think /boot. the xp partition is at the end of the disk. i also have a zip100 drive (hdb | d:), a dvd-rom (/dev/cdrom | e:) and a cdrw drive (/dev/cdrom1 | f:).
i have a 3com 3c905 (or something like that) nic which was working without me doing anything special, which was nice since i remember needing a floppy with a driver for my 3c509b when i tried redhat on a different computer.
my internet connection is fed through a windows 2003 machine which runs my private ftp and http servers and holds my two biggest hard drives (a 40- and an 80-gig; its d: and e: drives) and shares them out to my lan. it's actually set up as one share (from the d: drive), which happens to have ntfs junctions to the other drive so i have access to the whole thing through just one share, which i easily map to a drive letter in windows. this also proved handy for redhat, where i added a line to /etc/fstab to mount this share.
speaking of ntfs, i have heard that linux should only use ntfs in read mode or else risk destroying the data on that partition. i think i'm okay because the way i see it, linux is using smbfs to access these drives. the win2k+3 box is accessing them using ntfs, but this should be transparent to the lan as it should just be smbfs to everything on the lan. so far i'm reading and writing without incident.

i found rpms for firefox and thunderbird and got those installed no problem (though as they were not official i had to replace icons myself). also got gaim set up to use my icq and aim accounts, though i'm not happy with gaim because it still has a lot of the "features" that i think were design mistakes in the standard aim client. i'd like something closer to miranda, which is windows-only (and, consequently, what i use in windows). i've heard that miranda can run under wine, but it seems that even though i've installed wine i don't know enough about it because it just tells me there's some database corruption problem and quits on me. if anyone can give me any tips on that i'd GREATLY appreciate it!
in the meantime i went looking for other linux clients that could do icq, aim, and irc and found kopete. it appears to be for kde only, so i installed kde off my redhat discs (i had only installed gnome--there was a problem when i installed mandrake in that gnome wouldn't run at all, so i thought gnome was cooler since i couldn't have it). as of yet i am still unable to install kopete as i need to resolve dependencies on qt and something else that i can't recall presently (i found an rpm for kopete 0.8.0). again, any help with this would be greatly appreciated!

after going into kde to try to get kopete up and running, and having used gnome for a week or so, i realized that i like the feel of kde better, and also like the fact that i was able to change what's in the menu (you probably can in gnome, but i couldn't figure out how!) -- the only thing i miss from gnome is in gnome i could use ico files as icons on launchers, and kde only seems to want to use png or xpm files.

back to wine, i was able to use wine to adequately run my favorite text editor, ultraedit. this was as simple as making a gnome launcher / kde menu option "wine /full/path/to/uedit32.exe" but again a similar command for miranda gave me the corrupt database error. ultraedit just hangs up for a while when i resize the window, and also has an odd way of rendering the menu, but nothing i can't live with.

i did a couple simple image edits in gnome (i use paint shop pro in windows) and managed to find my way around in there, though i'm not sure it will do everything i've been doing in psp, and i've actually heard it won't.

the other problem i've had is that tux racer is slow and jerky to the point where it's not playable, and i have a pentium-4, 2.4 GHz @ 533 MHz bus, with 512 MB ram runing at pc2100. and my video card is an nvidia geforce2 mx, so it seems like i should be able to handle tux racer. am i missing something here?

i hope to learn as much as i can about using linux by having it installed on my main computer, and then attempt switching the windows 2k+3 box to linux. it would keep running apache (with php) and mysql so that part would be easy, but i'd need to find a different ftp server and also get samba set up to share my "big" drives, as well as converting them to some other filesystem since i apparently can't write to ntfs safely from linux. hopefully i'll be able to try all this with my main computer without disrupting my access to everything i use the win2k+3 box for currently.

that's all for now (i know--it's a long entry!), and i appreciate any comments (especially if they help solve the problems i'm having with linux)!
i'll write more once i've made more progress

well the u.s. government has had this particular fear-mongering site up for a while now, but for anyone who hasn't seen it, you might want to check it out.

once you're done there, be sure to laugh at all the safety pictograms on this page i set up.

if that's not enough, check out this parody and this discussion thread.

yeah i'm not really a 'tough guy' per se (i mean really--this is slashdot after all), so i'm not too happy being @toughguy.net. but my standards are high--i require pop or imap access (or i guess forwarding would be okay), and it has to be absolutely free. it's especially good if it doesn't put some sort of signature (advertisement or otherwise) at the end of all my e-mails . . .

can anybody suggest something to me?

i've been working on a couple projects in visual basic for a while now, and just yesterday i finally set up a page on my website where you can download binaries and source code.

i'm still working on everything i've listed there, and i'm wondering what it means for these programs to be gpl'd or if they even can since they're made with visual studio. if i want them to be gpl'd, what do i have to do?

anyway if anybody uses windows and wants to try out my programs, please let me know what you think! feel free to sign the guestbook on my site, or i guess you could post comments here too (but you'd miss out on the mad-lib!)

i just want something to eat for dinner, but reading the directions tombstone gives, it appears that

1: i am not allowed to eat the pizza without cooking it
2: i am not allowed to thaw the pizza

the first statement leads me to believe that i should first cook the pizza, then eat it; however the second statement forbids that i allow the pizza to thaw! considering that a pizza which starts out frozen must thaw at some point in the cooking process, statement 2 indicates that i should eat the pizza without cooking it, in order to avoid thawing it. actually this probably won't work either, as the frozen pizza will surely thaw in my stomach if not while it is still in my mouth, and of course by eating the pizza uncooked i am violating statement 1!

thus the only conclusion is to buy frozen pizzas from someone other than tombstone so you can EAT them, or just let them sit in your freezer for all of eternity.

if you want to see what i'm talking about, read the COOKING DIRECTIONS on the back of a tombstone pizza.