Older blog entries for AArthur (starting at number 19)

Check out the Nubus PowerMac Kernel Compiling Howto, that I posted today. It's been a bit slow news week, so not much has been posted.

Scouts

Stuff is starting to slow down. Still working on what to do at the meeting on Thursday. Need to get a second coat of paint for my sister's room, to finish up my Family Life group project with my sister.

Besides that, I still need to get Mr. Rapp to sign my Eagle Project book, although I did get a letter of thanks from him. I also have to go over my Personal Management Budget, not to mention going over the Family Life stuffs.

School

For college, I am thinking in studying Political Science, and a carrer involving Goverment (obviously). I probably will attend Hudson Valley Community College for the first two years, then for the second two years SUNY Albany. Obviously, I'm more certain about the first, I have to think more about the second.

Albany is a good area to live in for studying this, as the State Goverment is in New York. SUNY Albany offers an intern program, that lets Juniors and Seniors in college work with the State Goverment.

Not to mention, I like this area alot, as much of New York State. It also mean, I can save some money going to college, as I won't have to pay for board.

I'm 45 out of 92 in the Greenville Centeral Class of 2001. My overall GPA is 80.2. That said, I've taken fairly difficult classes, such as Course IV and Physics. My Social Studies total average is around a 90, which isn't that bad. I took the SATs in November, I don't have the score yet.

I figure I'll start out at a community college, as it will be slightly easier, and I will be able to get into a better school for the final 2 years, then if I started out in a 4 year college.

I decided to go into the field of Political Science instead of a computer related field because:

I fixed up the XFree86 4.0 howto, with the corrections <blanksout>somebody</blanksout> sent me. Thanks, Again for them.

Also up on iMacLinux is a new Howto written by me, dealing with mounting .iso images in Mac OS, and burning them using Adaptec Toast. Somebody was asking me about how to do this yesterday on IRC, so I decided to create a Howto.

As always, we are looking for help over at iMacLinux. Eventhough I am the current content maintainer, as you can see I'm very busy (and it's a big project) we need all the help we can get.

You don't need to be an expert to help, or have lots of free time. Beelers, who is helping with parts of iBookLinux.net, is very busy, still he manages to help out. I'm no expert either, with only about 2 1/2 years Linux experience, and about 6 years Mac OS experience.

Scouts

There has been a small update to the Troop 89 Website, mainly with updated dates and news.

This weekend I plan to work on my Family Life MB group project, which involves painting my sister's room. Cool. I want to get it done.

Society

As I sit in a candle-lit room, next to my computer, I sit back and look at society. Today as you all know was Black Friday. Yes, the hellish day in the city, where people rush to Mr. Big Commerical. I sit in disbelive over the fights I hear about on the news about getting a parking space at Toys 'R Us, just to get the latest wizbang toy. I guess the blame goes on the stupid kids who demand the toys -- but is the fault the adults.

Any rate, it's over, and I avoided it completely, by staying up in my room, in my house in the middle of nowhere.

Holiday Sprit

Excluding all of the Consumerism stuff I talked about above, I love the Holidays. Yesterday I watched the Macy's Thanksgiving Prade on NBC, followed by "It's A Wonderful Life". That's the truth.

Life is fun. You should always have fun. And sometimes forget your worries and cares. Christmas is a reflection of life, and how great it truely is. The Holidays show people's love to one and another (excluding the parking lots).

Today, I have been listening to Mp3s, that I have downloading mostly from OpenNap. And, yes I own records and or CDs of most of them, but I am too lazy to rip them by myself. Christmas music is awsome, especially alot of the older stuff (from the fourties, fifities and the sixities) -- like Bobby Helm's Jingle Bell Rock, Bing Crosby's It's a White Christmas, Nat "King" Cole's The Christmas Song, Andy Willam's It's the Most Wondeful Time of The Year, Lou Montie's Dominick the Italian Christmas Donkey, etc.

Of course, Nat "King" Cole has that cool song "Those Lazy Hazy Crazy Days of Summer" for summer too.

iMacLinux

Those of you who reguluarly read iMacLinux, will notice our new discussion question. The idea is that every few weeks we post a question to everybody in general, with the author's opinion of the question, and readers can give there feed back.

This week it's about the "Quik" booter loader, and distro's support of it. It posts the question of should distros support it, and to what extend. I brought this topic up, as Quik documentation is hard to get at now days, and while most distros include Quik, there is no automated install when setting up the distro, like is avalible for yaboot (in the October LinuxPPC release).

Future ideas for discussions include:

It's a Friday. I can (at last!) leave in 25 minutes. And then to bed (eventhough I am not as tired as I was last week).

Today, I added a projects page to this site. iMacLinux was up for a while yesterday, it appears sourceforge mysql stuff was working for a while. But now it's not. :Z/

I plan to have ready another G&H for iMacLinux around midnight.

It's possible that within the next week it will be moved to John's machine, but as I have said before, I have no control over that.

At scouts last night, the X Patrol discussed planning and excuting events, while the neos worked on other stuff.

I plan to get Family Life and Personal Management wrapped up this week, and meet with Edge Bagg next week. I still need to also get ahold of Mr. Rapp to get final approval on my Eagle Project.

I got my report card today (I'm a Senior in Greenville), my grades were: drama 88, chorus 81, gym 87, physics 64, pig 90 and 65 in precalc. Besides the 64 in Physics I'm pretty happy. Bit upset about that, I wonder if that includes the makeup test I took, and Miss. Orris didn't know where they were for a while.

Okay, this qbasic shit in Advanced Computer class is really getting on my nevers. Especially how you declare strings with a $ at the end of stuff. I much prefer the way bash works. Luckly this is my final qbasic project. I plan to make it my last one (assuming I don't have to do this crap in college).

Here is another lame qbasic program I did for my beginning programming class:

'Formula Program

 CLS

 choose:
PRINT
PRINT "            finUN - (c) 2000, Andrew Arthur, BSDL"
PRINT
PRINT "This program finds the area of a variety of shapes."
PRINT
PRINT "Type of Shape Your Finding Area of:"
PRINT "     1) Circle"
PRINT "     2) Square"
PRINT "     3) Rectangle"
PRINT "     4) Triangle"
PRINT "     5) Octogon"
PRINT "     6) Oval"
PRINT "     7) Exit finUN"
PRINT
PRINT "Note: Hitting Return will Quit This Program."
PRINT


 INPUT "Type of Shape: ", shape$
PRINT

         IF shape$ = "1" THEN GOTO cir
        IF shape$ = "2" THEN GOTO squ
        IF shape$ = "3" THEN GOTO rec
        IF shape$ = "4" THEN GOTO tri
        IF shape$ = "5" THEN GOTO oct
        IF shape$ = "6" THEN GOTO ova
        IF shape$ = "" OR shape$ = "7" THEN GOTO intheend
   
CLS
PRINT "           INVALID Value!       "
PRINT ""
PRINT "Please Try Again."
PRINT ""
GOTO choose

 cir:
INPUT "Diameter of the circle: ", diacir
INPUT "Units: ", unitcir$
diacir1 = diacir ^ 2
diacir2 = diacir1 * 3.14
PRINT "The Size of the Circle is: "; diacir2; unitcir$; " 
Squared"
SLEEP 100000
devnull$ = INKEY$
CLS
GOTO choose

 squ:
INPUT "Length of Square: ", sqrl
INPUT "Width of Square: ", sqrw
INPUT "Units of Measurement: ", unitsqr$
arsq = sqrl * sqrw
PRINT "Area of the Square is: "; arsq; unitsqr$; " Squared"

 SLEEP 100000
devnull$ = INKEY$
CLS
GOTO choose


 rec:
INPUT "Length of Rectangle: ", recl
INPUT "Width of Rectangle: ", recw
INPUT "Units of Measurement: ", unitrec$
arec = recl * recw
PRINT "Area of the Square is: "; arec; unitrec$; " Squared"
SLEEP 100000
devnull$ = INKEY$
CLS
GOTO choose

 tri:
INPUT "Length of Rectangle: ", recl
INPUT "Width of Rectangle: ", recw
INPUT "Units of Measurement: ", unitstri$
arei = (recl * recw) / 2
PRINT "Area of the Square is: "; arei; unitstri; " Squared"
SLEEP 100000
devnull$ = INKEY$
CLS
GOTO choose

 oct:
PRINT "This finds the parameter of an Octagon with sides 
all of "
PRINT "the same lenght."
PRINT
INPUT "What is the length of ones side of the Octagon: "; 
oct1
INPUT "Units of Measument: "; octmeas$

 oct2 = oct1 * 8
PRINT "The size of the Octagon's Parameter is: "; oct2; 
octmeas$; " Squared"
SLEEP 100000
devnull$ = INKEY$
CLS
GOTO choose

 ova:
INPUT "What is the diameter of the Oval: ", diaova
INPUT "Units:", unitcir$
diaova1 = diaova ^ 2
diaova2 = diaova1 * 3.14
PRINT "The Size of the Oval is: "; diaova2; unitcir$; " 
Squared"
SLEEP 100000
devnull$ = INKEY$
CLS
GOTO choose

 intheend:
CLS
END

First off, I want to appologize for the stuff that's been going on down at iMacLinux.net. I have no control over it (nor does any of the iMacLinux staff), I don't even have an shell at the machine at question.

What's going on? Sourceforge's mysql database is reguluarly refusing connections. Nope, the iMacLinux engine written by Stew Bendict, stores it's data in this database, and it's essential for it's proper operation. He has sent in a help request to Sourceforge, but it has yet to be anwsered.

So where does that leave us? For now, the site will be hard to access at times, try reloading the page. Sorry. In the very near future, John will be hosting this site on his own machine, that he will have full (root) control over. The only problem to expect with this, is it is on a somewhat limited bandwidth -- which shouldn't be a problem, except due to Slashdoting problems.

In short, this is what's happened over the past week:

Sorry, I meant to get this up last night, but I feel asleep.

Here is a rundown of stuff I've been working on over at iMacLinux.net:

Wow. It's November already. I just got back from the Scout meeting, it was quite suprising the number of deer on or next to the road. And yes, you can tell it's November in Clarksville, due to the wood smokey, cow shitty heavy air. Which reminds me, I have to get my butt together on this scout stuff.

Yes, my TI-89 came on Monday. Halloween was awsome (yes, I stayed home and slept through it). I had great fun on the Copland Hill Campout.

On the iMacLinux front, the sidebar is being redone, and some of the howtos and guides have been updated or added. PenguinPPC, added a link to the site in their sidebar. Hopefully soon I'll be doing more stuff with that site, especially if John comes up with ideas on how to work together.

The whole LinuxPPC.org vs. PenguinPPC.org is very stupid if you haven't heard already. Last week these sites split apart, due to silly bickering (over the fact that Jeramy wouldn't give Jeff Carr an account on PenguinPPC). Kids, it's time to grow up. Jeff isn't out there to turn PenguinPPC into a advertisement for LinuxPPC. Heck, he has been grumbling about making LinuxPPC, Inc. into a non-profit. Of course an interactive kind of thing would be cool, but Jeramy feels that would be a security risk.

I've decided not to take sides on this issue, and generally ignore it to whatever extent possible. That said, I'm siding more with Jeramy Smith on this issue, mainly because PenguinPPC has the developer backing. Okay, enough of this stuff.

The good news is Turkey day is coming closer and closer. Yum. Prades, Turkey, Stuffing, Gravy, "It's a Wonderful Life" are all on my mind. I'm taking the SAT's on Saturday, if you cared.

Sunday Morning, 1:25 - How does feel... to be on your own, like a rolling stone?

Still waiting for that damn TI-89 calculator I ordered to arrive. I've been waiting for more then two weeks -- something that was suppost to be here in 2 to 4 days. Blah.

I actually used my CD burner tonight, to do something besides play with CD-RWs. I burned an Audio CD of a bunch of different music -- a mix -- it's cool. I've only had this drive for 3 months -- about time I use it :P

Lately, I've been fiddling around with Linux 2.4-test10 on the PowerPC. It seems pretty stable, and devfs rocks. Speaking of that, expect soon a G&H on iMacLinux about devfs. Now that the mess with atyfb is fixed, I'm happy again.

Jeff Carr of LinuxPPC fame called me on Wensday to let me know what's up with LinuxPPC.org. Somehow talking to him in person was kind of neat. Most of the stuff he had to say wasn't important or related to me, but it was nice of him to call.

Oh, as always, we are looking for people to helpout -- especially on CubeLinux and PowerMacLinux sites -- which need some work. Hey, it wasn't my idea to add them <grin>. Actually, I think it's cool having themed sites like that.

Rsync has changed around over at penguinppc (its now the main site for Linux-Pmac). At least now it works -- try rsync -avz penguinppc.org::linux-pmac-devel /usr/src/linux.

I went out for a nice drive today, the scout stuff is comming along nicely too. (But I really need to get my butt in gear). I have some homework -- gasp -- to do before Monday. Sunday Night, 9:00 PM seems like a good time to start.

Oh, if you want some Greenville, New Yak humor, take a look at PunksofGreenville. Then again, you would probably have to be in Orris' Class to understand it.

I should go to bed soon, it's getting late.

Two weekends till the Copeland Hill Camping Trip that I'm going on, and that weekend I get a free extra hour -- the clock goes back an hour.

38 days, to the best day of the year. That's Turkey Day -- I can taste it already. Lets not forget those wonderful thanksgiving day prades, and "It's a Wonderful Life" on CBS. This is truely the best day of the year. Also, it should be noted, that Christmas is 68 days away, and that y2k+1 is 74 days away. Yum.

Some new stuff on iMacLinux. Tommorows a monday. Oh well. Listening to the American Gold Christmas Edition 1997 (put on HI-FI video tape, so I don't have to keep flipping/changing the tape).

<rant> KDE 2.0 is not bloated. It's full featured. If you don't compile in exceptions, it even decently fast on an older machine -- like my PowerMac 4400, with it's 200 Mhz processor and 32 MB of RAM. If you have a slower machine, with little RAM, run Blackbox or the console, and stop complaing. I can't stand people who whine. </rant>

So in theory, KDE 2 is suppost to be out this week. Awsome.

There is some new stuff on iMacLinux, and now along with the rest of the team, I'm working on getting PowerMacLinux.net ready. Cool.