Older blog entries for Mulad (starting at number 61)

Wasting my weekend again -- I should really make an attempt to study and do some homework. And do laundry. And eat. Well, OK, it's not hard to convince me to eat.

Anyway, I watched The Whole Nine Yards last night. Very funny movie. Bruce Willis and Matthew Perry make for a great combination. Unfortunately, that movie kept me up far too late. Oh well.

I can't wait to see The Lone Gunmen on Fox tonight. I hope it will be an entertaining show. I suspect my expectations are high, though, so there's a good chance I'll be disappointed.

Well, I'd better start doing stuff..

Well, I got TV listings on my homepage again. They seem to be somewhat flaky, though, since the source of the data has been acting weird all day. I still have to figure out a way to sort the channels to be in numerical order, but that shouldn't take too long..

In the process of figuring out all of the right channel numbers, I discovered that NASA TV is running a Robot Wars-esque competition right now. It's pretty entertaining ;-)

2 Mar 2001 (updated 2 Mar 2001 at 04:30 UTC) »

Finally decided to play with the CueCat that my family got from Wired. I was wondering why the decoding software that I was using just wouldn't work. Then I realized that the software doesn't directly touch the hardware and was reading cooked input. These programs don't like Dvorak layouts ;-) I guess that someone (maybe me, but I doubt I'll put that much effort into it) will have to re-write some of the software so it can play nicely with different keyboard layouts.. It'd also be nice if I could somehow power down that damn bright red light, but I think it's hardwired to always be on..

Anywho, not much else going on. Had dinner with some friends at Baker's Square and finally tried out the French Apple Cheesecake -- good stuff, though I think my favorite is still Caramel Apple รก la Mode. Of course, I don't think it helped my (so far pretty vain) attempts at exercising. I'd really like to cut down on my soda-pop belly, but there's no way I can get myself to work out every day or every other day. I did manage to look up some `ab' exercises, so maybe I'll at least find a few minutes here and there to do those..

Later

[root@3po][~]# reiserfsck /dev/hdc3

<-------------reiserfsck, 2000------------->
reiserfsprogs 3.x.0f
Will read-only check consistency of the partition
Will put log info to stderr
Do you want to run this program?[N/Yes] (note need to type Yes):Yes
Segmentation fault (core dumped)
[root@3po][~]#

*sigh*

Well, in addition to reading Slashdot and LinuxToday to get a lot of my news, I've recently been occasionally visiting Yahoo's most e-mailed and most viewed content pages. Those pages bring up some pretty interesting articles (and a lot of pictures that border on porn, but that's okay ;-)

25 Feb 2001 (updated 26 Feb 2001 at 03:28 UTC) »

I'm becoming ill. This sucks. Headache and sore throat, mostly, so it's not entirely obvious to other people. I wouldn't really mind, but I have an exam tomorrow (which I have not studied much for yet).

Oh well, I'll just have to try and clean myself up and see if I feel any better..

Later

N*Sync on The Simpsons? Oh, how Matt Groenig has fallen...

Even later

Oo! Lone Gunmen premieres next week! Hopefully it will be entertaining.

Ahh. Downloaded and compiled Linux 2.4.2 last night. Finally booted it up. The first time I started the system, it didn't work -- I've had trouble with IDE DMA on my system. Fortunately, I had a plan of attack. I run a K6-2/350 at 392 MHz -- bus speed of 112MHz, and a 3.5x multiplier. I'd probably try to bump it up even higher, but I'm already pushing a PC100 DIMM in my box. Anyway, I think the problem I had been having was that the kernel driver for my IDE chipset was assuming that things were running along at 33MHz, when they were in fact running a little faster than that at 37MHz (well, I think -- 112/3 = 37.333...) Just pass `idebus=37' to the kernel when booting, and everything works great. I can untar/bz2 whole kernels without huge I/O overhead once again! Actually, the main benefit of that is that my music doesn't skip ;-)

The whole mess had been broken back when I installed a new PC133 DIMM in my computer (replacing a sub-PC100 10ns DIMM) and decided to fiddle with the system clock. I had tried 400MHz, though I had run into trouble (probably with this same thing -- I probably could have just passed a different idebus parameter to get it to work, but I only figured this out today).

Pretty amazing that these POS computers we all have can have so many parts that run at so many different speeds without usually causing too many headaches. Then again, maybe that's why many boxes do mysterious things..

21 Feb 2001 (updated 22 Feb 2001 at 01:29 UTC) »

Well, looks like the Matrox G400 hardware doesn't support some nice things like Gamma correction on the second head. I wonder if it's worth it to go out and get a G450.. I suspect I'll go like this for a while. If it gets really annoying, I'll consider it, but until then, I need to beef up my cash reserves again.

Oh yeah, I should probably open another savings account so my money in checking doesn't just sit there collecting dust but no interest.. Considering the recent downturn in stocks, it might be worthwhile to invest sometime soon (on the theory that what goes down must come up, which is not as safe an assumption as the other way around).

For work, I'm digging around a bit to find out what to do about X11 connectivity to Windows desktops.. Looks like the development versions of PuTTY actually support X11 forwarding, so I'll be happy when the next release rolls around. The users at work have been running Reflection X, which is a little overpowered for what they need to do. Users just want to connect, run their program, see the fancy graphics pop up, fiddle around, and quit. Reflection X seems to insist upon making a huge event out of logging in. I much prefer the behavior of Exceed, which you start up before connecting to a remote system. It's also `transparent,' where you can still see the rest of the desktop. There's also no need to run an extra window manager -- it just puts X windows in Windows windows. Provided the $DISPLAY variable is set right, you can just run programs and have them pop up. I just wonder if it's a decent price..

Later

Suddenly, I'm thinking like Q from Star Trek:TNG -- ``Just change the gravitational constant of the universe!''

I've been playing around with GnuPG some more. I still don't have a mail client that I like where I can use GPG, but at work I've been using Pine, which has decent support. Anyway, I'm wondering if the public will ever start using crypto. GPG seems to work pretty well, even downloading new keys (if they are available) on demand. Of course, they need to have been uploaded to a keyserver first.. If Mozilla could have support for GPG, that would help things move along quite a bit.. Of course, it would be cool if there was a GPG plugin or something for MS Outlook, but that's almost a contradiction in terms...

Having some strange problems with Xinerama. The background does not want to wrap properly. Each screen starts the image over again at (0,0), so I can't set up the backgrounds like I want. However, aterm seems to pick up how the background is supposed to be, resulting in an interesting screenshot (3.2MB PNG). Note that I set the background shading at 90% of full brightness, which is not what I usually have -- it's just for demonstrating what's going on..

Anyway, I'm not exactly sure what to do about it. This is what happens when Gnome or XPlanet sets the background. (it's really annoying, because I like using XPlanet for my background..)

My incantation of X4.0.2 with Xinerama and the Matrox drivers also seems to leak memory pretty badly. I'm still trying to track down from a user perspective if there's anything that triggers it, or if it just happens on it's own. Also, I always have a nagging feeling that the kernel gets confused by the fact that the video card has 32MB of RAM on it that are mapped by the X server (actually, the X server has allocated 40MB from that 32 -- one 24 meg window, with two 8MB windows at the same location..)

Figuring out how much memory X is actually using is always difficult. The Resident Set Size is something like 85MB, which would seem about right if you take out the 40MB allocated to the video card. Unfortunately, the Resident Memory Size is something like 130MB, which I just don't understand..

Oh well, maybe I'll pull down a new version of X from CVS and see if I can compile it properly..

19 Feb 2001 (updated 19 Feb 2001 at 21:39 UTC) »
Almost Noon

A new day, sort of.

Got up and went to my CSci class -- class was canceled, but I still had to hand in my (unfortunately unfinished) homework. Oh well. Went to work for a while this morning, then went to my next class, where an exam was dropped on me. I guess I should have picked up a syllabus when I had a chance...

Anyway, I'm back at work. Right now, I'm looking for a piece of clip-art or a picture of a broken monitor (preferably smashed to bits and smoking or burning). I want to use it as the banner on a Netsaint box I'm building (the hostname will be `monitor', so I figure it's fitting). Unfortunately, I suspect my search will be fruitless..

Afternoon

Having some trouble getting OpenSSL and OpenSSH to compile/install properly on the servers here at work. The really new versions are not wanting to compile on some of the older OSes we have laying around (RH 5.2, some random incantations of Solaris). Oh well, just drop back a rev, I guess.. Those systems should probably be upgraded anyway (at least the Linux boxen).

The networking folks are going to run a vulnerability check on our servers sometime this week, and I'd like to be sure that they're zipped up as tight as possible.

On a completely different note: Girls suck. Sorta. Kinda. Well, okay, I'd be happy to make a different opinion if I could just figure out how to talk to them. blarg..

Got a new monitor -- it's a 17" Trinitron FD, labeled as a `MicronPC.com'.. Whatever. Anyway, I got Xinerama working on my G400 after going to Matrox's website and getting their newest X4.0.2 drivers. Unfortunately, X now refuses to accept the `-dpi' flag, and gv and other DPI-aware apps go pretty nuts.. (The X server says the DPI is something like 135x75)

Anyway, there are plenty of goofy things with Xinerama. Many Gnome dialogs like to pop up in the middle of the whole desktop, riding the `crack' between the two monitors. XPlanet doesn't work right, and Gnome can't set the background properly (I'm just using a random Propaganda tile right now). I also can't set gamma correction on the second head, and DPMS only works on the first head.

Strangely, this new monitor apparently doesn't talk VESA DDC, though that's not surprising considering that it was pretty cheap, at least for a flat 17" Trinitron ($249 at Best Buy).

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