Added a --exclude switch to linkfarm so I can stop
it from indexing my snorq output and the
BBDB mirror
area.
Phone line dead. Hopefully this means that handover to Esat has
happened, otherwise I may have to get all cranky and peevish
again.
March 30
Woke early. Stared in horror at some new and interesting
definition of 1TBS coding-style, as perpetrated by the eGalax folks. Cleaned it all
the hell up and changed all the stdout/stderr logging to
go to syslog instead, so I'll actually see it.
Added an ifup-local script to Qaz that hooks up the NFS
mounts when I'm at home, since sometimes I forget to do so
myself.
March 29
Spent most of the morning rearranging the office after Friday's
cleanup/painting. I now have a new desk (pro: it's bigger and more
solid; con: it's slightly lower underneath) and the box I'm
working on is right behind me so I don't need to scoot across the
floor to test my changes.
Having a look at Unison, a
file sync tool. It relies on Objective CAML, curiously
enough.
March 28
Someone gimme a cookie. I ripped enough of VIA's half-open
driver into the stock Linuxkernel to enable the S/PDIF
output. Go me!
March 27
Grr. My parents have a CDRW drive in their machine, a Memorex
32MAXX 1240AK. In happy happy Linux
land, you fling one of these in, and cdrecord goes,
"ah, a generic mmc CDRW" and that's it. In stupid stupid
Windows land,
you first fight to make it work under Windows 98 (my mom now knows
more about IDE cables than anyone not involved in the PC
construction industry should), then you upgrade that installation
to Windows 2K, then you gnash your teeth as the Roxio software
installation (a) is screwed up and (b) can't be uninstalled
because of (a). Much abuse of the net led me to a program called
roxizap which Roxio themselves produce to prise their
so-called Easy CD Creator (originally Adaptec software,
apparently) out of your Registry, although there are still traces
of it left even after running that. Then I installed the
version of Easy CD Creator Platinum that had fallen off the net
while I was tooling around with all this, and that told me that
"there are no supported drives in the system". So at the
moment I've got one window where I'm trawling for more
information, another where I'm grimly retrieving a large
CAB file so I can reinstall Easy CD Creator Basic, which
was what used be on the machine before Win2K ate it, and mostly
I'm thinking what I need to be doing is drinking heavily to
celebrate Ireland's Triple Crown success today.
March 26
Continued trying to upgrade various recalcitrant bits of
software on my parents' machine, since they're due back from
vacation shortly.
March 25
Went tooling around with Midtown Madness 2 again. Someone
recently released some impressive tracks, but packed them in such
a way that your average unzip tool would explode when trying to
unpack them - security through obscurity, if you like. So I dug
out my junzip.pl
program, then hacked on Archive::Zip a little, and
presto, unpacked files. Gnee gnee. Having unpacked the bits, I
then started poking around in the files and discovered that the
MM2 hacker I'd written a while back had suffered bit rot. Bah.
Also managed to get my Enterasys wireless card to interoperate
properly with the ZoomAir
"base station" in the spare room; apparently the ZoomAir is quite happy to deal
with any kind of encapsulation inbound, but the Enterasys won't
talk to anything that's not using RFC1042. I can't get the ZoomAir to work under Win2K,
though. I had it working before, but nothing I try will make it
work now. Either something changed in 2K, or the registry's all
crufted up.
American
History X is a fine, fine movie. The plot line is approximately
"Boyz
N Da Hood for Neo-Nazis", and it's a really powerful
portrayal of the whole White Power thing, and someone who's
realised it's not the way to go.
March 21
Well, Mark managed to jinx his own race by mentioning that he
hoped his start went okay. He lost ground to most of the grid off
the start, then got a puncture, then a drive-through penalty for
speeding in the pit lane, and finally spun the car off the track
into the porridge, where he got beached. To maintain the
"Holy..." factor, Jenson Button brought his BAR home in
third place, beating Reubens Barrichello for the
slot.
March 20
Holy... Ferraris first and third on the grid at Sepang, but
second place on the front row goes to... Mark Weber in the
Jaguar. Wow.
March 19
Cleaned up some more of the DVD Rentals stuff. I now have a
half-assed front-end to play with.
Fixed up another part of the dvdrentals.pl toy. Yay me!
Hacked up some stuff to reinsert some old band reviews into my CD
list. It's horrible, but hey.
March 17
Happy St. Patrick's Day. Whose round is it?
March 16
When I woke up this morning, the ITX box had crashed. Alas, I've
nothing connected to it that could have captured the kernel
panic. I really need to set it up with a serial-port console or
something until I get it stabilised. I think the problem was the
video driver, since I accidentally left mplayer tv:/
running overnight. Probably it blew up when the nightly backup
kicked in.
OOOOH. Just rechecked my phone line with the
"DSL-enabled" website, and it appears I'm good. Just
waiting for EsatBT now.
At last, a break in the not-worth-getting-excited-about run of
movies: X2, or
X-Men 2 if you prefer. Sure, there were bits I found kinda iffy,
but on the whole it was a "Yeah! Let's ROCK!" movie. One
to buy, I think, once Amazon's X-Men/X2 bundle cheapens a
bit.
March 15
Brief argument with parents' PC on the subject on network
drivers, which appears to be resolved now. Yay!
More w00t: finally figured out how to get the TV card to display
on the, er, TV out. Now I find I'm short a S-Video connector,
since the composite video feed into the TV card appears to be
audio-free.
March 14
Finally set the jukebox up and running again. Hooked to the
surround-sound amp. Muhahahah!
Got the machine entirely backed up on CD-RWs so that (a) I've got
a full restore in case I blow up anything and (b) I can reuse the
disks once I'm happy that the machine survived my attentions. Go
me!
Figured out how to make KDE/Qt's signals-and-slots stuff work,
eventually. Still need to find something that resembles an
event-driven select-loop like POE's, and/or a "normal"
IPC interface.
March 13
Tooling with KHTML. Kinda neat, although apparently it regards
loading file:// images from http://-originated
pages as a bad idea and refuses to do so. Without
warning.
March 12
Investigating backup options for parental computer since my
Mondo Rescue CD either isn't bootable or won't boot in said
computer.
W00t! A cheque! From EIRCOM! Credit for the closed account that
was seventy-something euro overpaid!
March 11
Parents' computer is staying with me while they're away on
holiday so I can clean it up and upgrade it and that sort of
thing.
March 10
There's a good line in the outtakes that describes Bruce
Almighty to a tee: "You want to paint pictures like this,
you have to use some dark colours". Jim Carrey does all the
typical Jim Carrey overacting, but around about the two-thirds
point the movie gets rather grim for a bit - in a surprisingly
good way. The allegory is laid on a bit heavy, and calling the
lead female character Grace is rather blunt, but hey. Some of the
outtakes and deleted scenes were funnier than parts of the movie
proper, so the DVD's probably a better bet than seeing it in a
theatre.
March 9
Hacking at the DVD rentals script for a bit
resulted in it working again, at least partially,
anyway. Yay!
March 8
eGalax get bonus points
for their documentation and source code, but lose it all in their
makefiles which do horrible things to determine if various
dependencies are available. Really horrible
things. Ick.
FANFARE! eircom paperwork FINALLY arrived. Now I need to see how
quickly I can get rid of eircom in favour of an EsatBT DSL
line...
March 7
Ferrari romped through Albert Park to finish 1-2. Jordan managed
to bring a car home as well, albeit not in points or
anything.
The whole F1 thing totally threw my sleep cycle out of whack, so I
ended up watching TV until the wee hours; Plunkett and
Macleane, which I've seen before and really liked, and B.Monkey
which I missed the start of and then sort of half-watched as I did
bad things to the Mini-ITX box. Which, incidentally, I bought a
new hard drive for as the scrap drive I'd thrown into it turned
out to be really scrap - the head's clicking at some
point on the disk. Oh well. More coasters, I guess. Of the movies,
the former is again missing out on the quotes section in IMDB;
easily the best line of the movie is Jonny Lee Miller saying,
"I was fabulous, and we had a bloody good
time!"
March 6
Equilibrium
wasn't bad, but again it's not one I'll be buying. It's sort of
Fahrenheit 451 on steroids with martial arts thrown in every so
often.
Yay! All-Ferrari front row for the new F1 season. Barrichello and
Schumacher Senior both ripped up and threw away the lap record for
Albert Park, with the German pipping Rubeño to pole
position by just under 8 hundredths of a second.
Mini-ITX: I may have to figure out how to hook a SCART connector
to this. I can't get the TV tuner card and the on-board TV-out to
play nicely, which means, absurdly, that I can watch TV on a
remote display but not on the console, er, TV set. Still, kinda
neat to be sitting here with XScreenSaver
bouncing about on the TV while XMMS feeds me music through its
speakers.
And to top off the day, the Irish Rugby team beat the English at
Twickenham. That is to say, we beat the winners of the Rugby World
Cup on their home ground. It's only our second win at Twickenham
in 20 years, and the first time the England squad have been
defeated (a) as RWC winners and (b) on home ground since the Six
Nations Cup started in 1999 (it was the Five Nations Cup before
that). So, I'm off to the pub.
March 5
DVD Rentals updated their
site, which broke all the scripting I had for it in several
ways. Plus there are several rookie errors in the update, but
hey. That's why I was writing scripts in the first place. Oh
well.
March 4
So, ah, eircom swear blind they sent out my account paperwork
last Thursday. And it hasn't turned up. So maybe I'll ask them to
check that they're sending it to the right address. After all,
just because they've managed to bill me at the right address
doesn't mean they'd send account agreement documents there,
eh?
March 3
Slightly successful day. Got my new Mini-ITX board, which I've
built using spare parts I conveniently had lying around into an
approximation of a PC. I definitely need to get a quiet PSU and
probably a quieter hard drive, since both those items are
currently way louder than the board. I also managed to get the
spca50x driver to half-way talk to my digicam, which is
cool.
March 2
Okay, Emacs' RPM specfile mode totally rules. I
should have checked it out ages ago.
Hrm. My serial port appears to be going through one of those
phases where it decides not to work under Linux.
I think all this'd be a non-issue if I was using
ACPI.
Weird. X just apparently lost one of my fonts; specifically the
one I'd been using for Emacs.
March 1
Had to rebuild XMMS-GTK2 with
ALSA support before the RPM
files were happy, but now it's working. Some weirdness, but it's
nice to have my MP3 player back.
Hmm, interesting. Esat BT's flat-rate service (180 hours/month for
30 quid) works on calendar month rather than, say, 30-day
period.
Rebuilt the arts_output plugin against GTK2/GLIB2 so now
everything is at least correctly linked together. Still some
weirdness in XMMS but I'm
insufficiently bothered by it to do anything about it just
yet.