Whee, my parents have gone on holiday so what was the first thing I did? Yep took over the house, moved the k62 thats been lying in a corner in my room for the past 2 months into the living room. I am typing this lying on my parents sofa using an infra-red keyboard and watching widescreen TV, luxury.
Oh yeah I've also been to see planet of the apes, damn fine film that I recommend seeing.
Had a job interview today, unfortunately they wanted someone with a bit more experience than I had so I've got to keep looking yet. Also went to sign on today, turns out that they are still refusing to pay me benefit because they apparently haven't recieved copies of my bank statements. This is very annoying because I watched them being faxed to the head office only last week <sigh>.
Applied for a few more jobs today, but still no interviews yet, ah well.
Had some fun with the TV card today, since I moved home I've been using my 14" protable to watch tv, so today I set out to resolve that. I ended up building myself a splitter with the spare bits of co-ax and other things that I had lying around the house, I now have tv/video output on the computer and on the 14" portable :) I also disovered that my recent memory upgrade now allows perfect dvd playback on the second monitor while I work/surf on the main monitor :)
ALso the machine now seems to be remaining stable, although I don't know wether it's a mobo problem on the third dimm slot or perhaps incompatible dimms.
Machine Problems: Once again my machine seems to have been unstable over the weekend, despite upgrading to 2.4.7-ac8 (from ac2). But I have decided that it's still a hardware problem and have removed the 128mb dimm from my system and so far it seems to be stable.
Dual Head: Decided to start playing with this feature on the G450 again, I got Xinerama working after playing with the XF86Config and had fun playing with that for a while. There is a problem however in that my two monitors aren't actually next to each other, so I set out to get 2 desktops working. A long time later raptor on #linux (irc.openprojects.net) showed me how to get it working and I now have an excellent setup. Enlightenment and Gnome run on the 19" and just Enlightenment runs on the 17" I'll pehaps put a picture up when I get the digital camera back from Kodak.
Programming: Had fun playing with Glade over the weekend and started going through my gnome/gtk book and then promptly stopped with a problem, which eventually turned out to be a corrupted glib.h. It must have been corrupted during one of the system crashes.
Cinema: Saw Rush Hour 2 on Monday, I thought that it was better than the first and it is now high up on my list of this years top 10 of films.
More bad news today <sigh> my benefit claim has been rejected, this is three days after I re-submitted my claim which is three weeks after my first claim "dissappeared". Whats worse is in order to find out why you have been rejected you have to go into the job centre.
The RAM saga continues, I added another 256 dimm to the machine which seemed to remain stable for the rest of the morning so I added the final new dimm. BOOM, the system would only recognise 236mb of ram before rebooting. After more testing it turned out to be a dodgy dimm so I now have 2x256 and 1x128 in my machine and will get on to Scan on Monday.
Kodak agreed to repair my DC215 for free and DHL actually arrived on time to pick something up, which is a change as couriers never seem to arrive on time to my parents house when picking things up.
Had some strange experiences with the Athlon, upgraded from 128mb to 768mb (max this system will take) and I couldn't do anything without it segfaulting. Put the 128 back in and it's all okay, I put one of the 256 dimms back in by itself today and it seems to be stable but I stopped there because I wanted to actually use the machine today, I'll try the other dimms tommorrow.
Still at least it's been raining here which is good.
Today has not been a good day, the first event was when I went the the Job Centre to sign on. I asked why I hadn't been paid for the last time and after half an hour I got told that my claim had been completely lost! It aparently left my local office and has never been seen again, which meant I had to re-submit my claim which meant, yes you guessed it fill out all the forms from scratch.
My afternoon was then taken up by a visit to the Dentists with my mother. I should have gotten suspicous when she said "You can drive there and I'll drive back" (we share a car). This unfortunately meant that I got dragged around a garden centre although I did get to see some of the cool fish they had in some of the ponds/tanks.
Linux froze on me yet again today, I suspect Mozilla is the culprit and is leaking memory. I may order some SDRAM tommorow upgrade this beast from 128mb to make it a bit faster.
wow, Telsa has been reading my diary. Good job that I read hers. :) I'm now going to have to update my web page, with correct mail addresses, I was waiting to get my domain sorted first, suppose I'll spend a few more days to sort out the domain otherwise just update the NTL pages which shouldn't be there considering I no longer have an NTL account :)
Things have been quiet today, got DRI working on the G450 but there is still something wrong somewhere. Oh, it's also still disgustingly hot here :(
Nothing much has been going on recently, it's been far too disgustingly hot here in South Wales to do much coding :(
Went to go and see Shrek last night, more out of a desire to sit in an air-conditioned cinema for 2 hours than to watch the film. It was however highly enjoyable, one of the best comedies I'd seen in a while.
Signed up to another job agency on Friday, this lot sound quite hopeful at finding me a job, although I'd be happy with just an interview for now.
Watched the Greman Grand Prix today and was well impressed by the crash between Luchiano Burti <sp?> and Michael Shumacher, although I don't think they really intended to do it. The rest of the race was good tho, lots of engines blowing up and I was pleased to see a Williams at the win even if it was Ralph and not Montoya.
I've been wrestling with DRI support on the G450 today, figured out why I couldn't get it to load and realised that it is most likely X that is at fault, which will mean another big download over 56k (sigh).
Spent the entire day today building a SmoothWall machine out of my Dads old P120. My first attempts fell foul to a dodgy ISO, a recommendation by the guys on irc.smoothwall.org told me to make another copy which worked perfecty. My second problem then seemed to be no network drivers loading, moving to the beefier K6/2 denied any problems with the card and got Smoothwall running for the first time. I then realised I was using a shared ISA/PCI slot on the P120, a quick visit to the Bios sorted this and Smoothwall was fine. All in all a damned fine product, even my Dad is happy using the web interface to dial out. Still, the lengthy time spent on this and a pre-arranged Badminton match put paid to any chances of playing with GTK/Gnome.
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