Blog has been moved to here:
The new blog

So long and thanks for all the free hosting

U.S. President George W. Bush, in a televised speech Sunday, said that the capture will assure the Iraqi people that "that the torture chambers and the secret police are gone forever."

Oh, my, they finally locked up John Ashcroft.
[rimshot]

I suppose I've been nerding this up a bit too much. It's a blog, not a freaking guide to using Linux. Well, time to get a little less objective.

I was sitting at dinner tonight, letting the mind wander, and I started thinking about homesickness. Like, the fact that since I've been here at Purdue, I haven't really felt any homesickness at all. This contrasts sharply with my 3 weeks at Rose-Hulman a couple summers ago, most of which was spent over a toilet losing my lunch because I was so overcome with homesickness. Why did that happen there and not here? I think I've figured it out.

In essence, my definition of "home" has three components: the place [my house], the people [friends & family] and the posessions [my computer, my car, and anything else I own]. Now, I think I can pretty much survive any amount of time with at least a majority of items from one of the categories. However, when I was at Rose for an excruciating three weeks, I was totally without anything from any of the three columns. I was unable to go to my house, I might as well have been in China. I had none of my friends or family there. And though I did have my car there, I was rarely in it, so it did me little good.

However, here at Purdue, I've got my computer, and my books, but not my car, and plenty of old and new friends. Plenty from 2 of 3 categories. So, that solves that riddle, which has been bugging me since I got here.

Also, it SNOWED today, and the campus looks pretty good with a blanket of snow. In fact I just got back from wandering around campus aimlessly and looking at it. This may make me alter my plans of driving back up here Friday and Saturday for my finals... I don't want to be driving long distances through this. Might have to wait until Saturday to go home, which would be major suckage.

In nerdy news, Fedora is still going great, I got the DVD player working, and got some of my DIVX movies to play with mplayer. However, I still don't have nvidia 3D support cause I can't get the fucking kernel module to load. Oh well.

On a lead from Good old Paco Cheezdom I fruited the roof and contacted Kevin Cogger, the creator of the original Flang File... and he sent it to me. So there it is, for all to see, even though there's probably less than 20 people on the face of the planet who have ever read it.

Here's to flangoliers!

All right, well Debian was totally fucked up, and RH9 was a bit crappy. So I installed Fedora Core 1, and let me say I am most impressed. This one's defintely a keeper.

The graphical installer detected everything, including my video card and even MY SOUND CARD!! Sweet.

The RPM thing is sort of a pain, not anywhere near as cool as FreeBSD ports or even apt-get, but I'll live with it for now. Getting Mozilla Firebird has been less than successful, and making XMMS play MP3's was hard (wtf?). But I'm content.

Fedora rocks.

While trying to solve my 256 color dilemma by installing the drivers straight from nvidia's site, the driver-loading-program totally went apeshit. Result: Can't load nvidia.ko. But the kernel needs to load nvidia.ko! nvidia.ko and the kernel are inseperable lovers. And since nvidia.ko is corrupt, the kernel can't load.

Bottom line: I'm back in Windows for a while. If I go back to FreeBSD it'll have to be a clean install. I'm going to weigh my options, and may end up sticking with windows for a while. Sigh... I was just starting to really like FreeBSD too... :(

You take the good, you take the bad, you take them both, and there you have: The Facts of Life. After almost a week of running FreeBSD, I thought I'd do a little write-up on my progress, and my reactions. I've titled it "The Facts of Life", after my favorite early 1980s sitcom.

The Good:

• Ports: The ports system is the best package-updating system I've yet seen. When I first installed Debian Linux I was amazed at how cool apt-get was, but FreeBSD's ports are even cooler. In essence, the ports system is an easy way of getting and updating almost any piece of mainstream software. All you have to do to install a program is cd to /usr/ports/[port extension, for example firebird is www/mozilla-firebird], then you just make install clean. To deinstall, make deinstall, or to reinstall, make reinstall. So easy.
• GUI: Let me say that I am aware, first off, that there is nothing particularly special about FreeBSD's GUI, since it uses XFree86 just like anything else. However, I was actually able to get X up and running with Fluxbox, which is way farther than I got in Debian.

The Bad:

• GUI: Yes, I am aware I just put this as one of "The Good". However, as I type this I am still running in 256 colors, and I don't know how to fix it. Still waiting to hear back from some people at FreeBSD Forums.
• Compatibility: Lunix, Lunix, Lunix. That's all people build for. From Nvidia drivers, to flash, to mozilla, getting stuff for FreeBSD was a pain compared to getting it for Linux. It makes me want to go try Debian again.
• Gaim: Which is of course not a problem inherent in FreeBSD. But Gaim is a pain, in my opinion. I found all the options for it, and it seems pretty well customizable, however I CANNOT GET THE OPTIONS TO TAKE EFFECT. I'll uncheck a box, and nothing will happen. I'll look in the options menu. Yep, the box is still unchecked. Restart gaim. Didn't take effect. Yep, the box is still unchecked. Yeah, irritating.
• Sound: This is another problem I'm sure I'll have across the open source OS world. I can't get my integrated sound card working. It's not even pretending like it wants to work.

The Facts of Life:

FreeBSD is OK overall. I'm gonna keep trying to get to a decent color mode, and I'll probably just buy a $15 PCI sound card if it can promise compatibility.

I may just end up switching to Debian when they release a version that has the 2.6.x kernel in it. Until then, though, I'm going to keep playing with FreeBSD; if nothing else, it's fun to mess with.

Thursday night me and "Diamond Joe" Rozzi (the BSD Master of Earhart Hall, not to be confused with "Diamond Joe" Quimby, mayor of Springfield) made an attempt at installing FreeBSD 5.1 on my desktop.

A recap: I got my new hard drive earlier that day, the 80 GB, which was in fact manufactured by Western Digital. I will say this now, but probably forget it later: I will never buy from Western Digital again. I set the hard drive to Primary Master, plugged it in, and the BIOS recognized it... but the POST and afterwards was so slow and clunky, I was starting to think I had knocked something loose on the motherboard in my installation. Paul "PMarks" Marks told me that he had had a Western Digital with the same problem, but when he put it on cable select and put it on the end of the IDE chain it worked fine. Voila, he was right.

So anyway, I decided that FreeBSD is cool and 1337 and I just had to have it, so after installation I had of course the EXACT SAME PROBLEM that I had when I installed Debian: XFree86 does not like my GeForce 4 Ti4400. Everything else on my computer works perfectly except for that. Well, "Diamond Joe" Rozzi told me last night he'd found out that instead of using the "nv" driver (which is the driver for nvidia cards), we should have been using the "nvidia" driver. I have no idea what the difference is, but I hope it works.

I won't get to test it out until Monday when I return to Purdue. So, wish me luck...

It's another lonely insomniac night. For no good reason.

Looks like I'll be getting a new digital camera for Christmas (hopefully). This will mean I will start posting to my deviantart space again. I can't wait... I've wanted a digital camera for months now. I can't count the number of times I've stopped on my way to class or something and been like "Damn, that would be a GREAT shot."

Also been listening to the George Winston album December. It's the best piano music ever, especially for December of course. If anyone wants a copy, give me a holler, I just might be able to hook you up... wink, wink.

(Over && Out)

I stopped that download just in time!

Go mad resnet-beating skillz.

My C drive made a suicide attempt the other day. I'm quite concerned. I just restarted, and it told me that there were bad sectors all over the place, and it had to correct them. So in the process it deleted almost 75% of its stuff.

That's what you get when you buy an IBM Deskstar. I ordered a new Maxtor 80 GB last night, should be here by Freitag, and I'm currently thinking about installing some Open-Source OS on it, maybe FreeBSD. Of course, I'm doomed to failure in that attempt, but so it goes. I'll keep on pushing that rock...

I just got back from Thanksgiving break. It was a blast. Spent plenty of time in Steak and Shake, and the movie theatre, with my comerades including (but not limited to, void where prohibited): Greg, Jay, Colin, Louis, Dave, Jozef, Ben, Sean... and of course we had fun with a Jehovah's Witness at the Steak and Shake Thursday night. "Hey, gentlemen, want to hear a parable?" In retrospect, we should have ran then... What's up with preaching in restaurants anyway?

Saw Master and Commander. What a good movie. Also saw Timeline. Uh, what was Michael Crighton smoking when he wrote that shit? There are many questions raised by this movie, including:

• Why was there a physicist [not only that, a wormhole expert] permanently employed at an archaeological dig?
• What's the real reason they couldn't take back moderm weapons? It was just assumed that we understood this.
• Why were they unable to take back any weapons or armor at all? Were the people who found the elaborate peasant's costumes unable to find swords, chain mail, bows and arrows?
• If you found the glasses on the floor and did not replace them, how can you then conclude that you would then not ever find them? If you never found them, you'd never move them!! [If you have no idea what I'm talking about, go watch the movie, please... or just download the bittorrent. Actually I encourage downloading the torrent because I relish the thought of the makers of this movie losing money and being stolen from.]
• etc...

But, more to the point, I want to have more Thanksgiving Break. But, only three weeks left, then I get three weeks off. Here's to counting the days until Christmas.

Oh. My. God.

...in other news, the city of Los Angeles ruled that black is white and up is down, citing past discrimination against African-Americans and the directionally challenged.

After a good week of high temperatures in the upper 60's, this morning I wake up and it's snowing. And weather.com tells me the wind chill factor is 11. Well, good thing I'd planned ahead so I can skip 2 of my 4 classes (CS180 being cancelled before hand, luckily).

So, I'm just hanging out here today, studying for my math exam which is tomorrow morning. Then right after I get to go home for Thanksgiving.

I can't wait...

So, on this lovely morning/evening, I took a trip down to the lobby to get some M&M's. Upon my return to the wonderful fifth floor, what do my wondering eyes behold, but a little sign on the bathroom door! "Do not enter", it reads. My curiosity piqued, I enter, and am immediately blasted with a stench which recalls memories of frog dissection in 10th grade biology... then I see some poor student pratically swimming in his own vomit, lying face-up on the floor. And of course, I think, "What would Jesus do?"

Jesus would obviously turn his vomit into wine so everyone can party a little hardier. Not being of the magical persuasion, I decided that perhaps I should take some other action.

My Basic Aid Training course from 3rd grade suddenly flashed into my mind. Being unsure how I could help him with diagrams of my house and the best fire escape routes, I then tried to think of something else. Aha! CPR. Well, let's take a pulse. It's there. Good. Is he breathing? Looks like it. Sorta. But then when I poke him with this here cattle prod he doesn't respond... I'd better hurry up and do something, cause I hear alcohol poisoning can kill you so bad you can die from it.

So, I run downstairs in an attempt to find Somebody with Authority. They'll know Standard Operating Procedure, as I'm sure this happens on a weekly basis while I'm sleeping. Sure enough the staff resident handled it in a cool manner, calling up the paramedics, who promptly arrived and dragged off the unconscious mutton-head hanging onto their shoulders.

So, uh, alcohol is bad for you... mkay?

Mkay.