Fujitsu Lifebook S-4546
I've re-installed a 2.4 series kernel, 2.4.18. I want to
see if I can get orinoco_cs working without a lot of hassle.
So far, no dice. I was playing with X and the DRI drivers
for the ATI video card, trying to get some speed out of
OpenGL in X. I can get about 125 frames per second with
glxgears, but my Matrox G400 gets about 550fps. As near as
I can figure, the video chipset in the laptop is a PCI
version of the ATI Rage 128 product family, X sees it as a
Mach 64 derivitive. Which means no hardware accelerated X
for OpenGL. I bought a SanDisk CompactFlash reader, it
works fine with kernel 2.2.20 as a USB storage device. Now
I don't have to pop out my 802.11b wireless card to put in
my PCMCIA CF adapter to get the pictures off of my camera.
I also bought a USB serial adapter on sale today at Staples,
it was originally $40, I got it for $10. It was made for
hooking up a Palm Pilot cable, but I plan on using it for
accessing serial consoles, instead of dragging my docking
brick around.
Observer
After my hard drive upgrade, I started getting SCSI bus
resets. Bad news. So about 2 weeks ago, I pulled
everything apart again, moved all the SCSI devices and
terminators so that they were one after another on the
cable, and it worked. No more bus resets :). Reason it
took me so long to do it is because I used to have my
computer in a space in between my desk and the wall, with a
25 pound UPS on top of it. I moved it to the other side of
my desk drawer, and moved the drawer over, so now it's a lot
easier to get into :)
Voodoo
This is my Portaboom test box. I can stuff various sound
, video, and network cards in this thing, to make sure
everything works with Portaboom. I've got a list of cards
on my
project page on Sourceforge. I just stuffed a $30
Voodoo3 3000 PCI card into it, and I'm going to give my best
try on getting the drivers up and running in Linux so I can
do OpenGL games and things, specifically PrBoom and maybe
some Quake luvin.
Pantera
This thing has the Asus P2B-D motherboard, which has the
fucked up USB support. Apparently Asus designed the board
with one too many resistors on the USB part of the board, so
that USB doesn't work correctly. The workaround is to short
a resistor on the motherboard, so that's what I did. I took
a piece of 24ga hookup wire, and soldered it across the
surface mount resistor. I also bought a SIIG USB CF
adapter, which doesn't work in Linux. I tried that first in
my newly modified USB setup, and it didn't work. After I
got the SanDisk, I tried that, and it worked perfectly the
first time. SIIG USB CF adapter no, SanDisk USB CF adapter yes.
tkBoom
I released version 0.5 of tkBoom on 25Mar2002. Most
significant part of the release is that you can now load
Doom PWAD files inside of tkBoom. So now you can literally
load thousands of new levels in Doom. I've also cleaned up
some of the dialogs, and things like OpenGL support works
now if you have an OpenGL binary. I've also been busy
converting all of my scripts to use hashes for holding Tk
controls, instead of individual variable names for controls.
Doing this has the HUGE advantage of making passing
controls between dialogs/functions super simple, you just
pass the reference to the hash that has all of the Tk
controls in it. I've gone from upwards of 50 varable
declarations to about 5 per function/dialog. I'm also
adding PWAD identification and level identification to
tkBoom, so when users choose external PWADs, the game can
actually do the right thing when it loads the PWAD into the
system. tkboom.pl the script is not 100% hash referenced,
but I expect it to be done by the time 0.6 comes out.
PortaBoom
Lots of behind the scenes stuff, I've hash referenced
PCC, so all I'm passing to most sub functions/dialogs is a
master config hash %z, and the parent dialog hash. It's
very nice code, if I do say so myself. Right now I'm in
bugfix mode, in preparation for a 0.4.5 release. 0.5.0 will
see the addition of Shares, you can add external shares to
PortaBoom, so that 1 server can serve Doom WADs to many
clients at once. I'd like to get things running so you can
mount the PortaBoom image from a server over the network,
all you would need to run PortaBoom is 1 floppy. Someday.
0.6.0 will see PortaBoom go on a huge diet, my goal is to
reduce the filesize of the ISO image from 50 megs compressed
to 25 megs compressed or better. I'm setting up a database
of information about files on a Linux system, and I'm going
to go file-by-file and do an audit, so that when I'm done, I
just ask the database for a list of files to use, and it
generates me one, and I build my PortaBoom image from files
copied from an existing live filesystem. Sounds complex,
but if it works correctly, I'll be able to easily generate
PortaBoom images, and they'll be as fat-free as they can be.
stream-db
Confession time; I was guilty of releasing code I did
not test by running it myself. I released stream-db 0.8db3
and db4, while I was personally running db2. Maybe if I was
running the current version, I would have caught all the
showstopper bugs. DOH! I just released 0.8db5 an hour or
two ago, it's what's running on my stream now, and it's
doing great.
misc
I had my first ice skating lesson on Tuesday. I think
I'm hooked. Never mind that I'm pretty much about to fall
on my ass at any given time, I can't wait to actually start
doing hockey type things. I fixed the license plate lights
in my truck, the bulbs have both been burnt out for over 2
years now. It's good that they're fixed now, I like to give
the police less reason to stop me :) I've started keeping a
paper notebook with me, it's where I write down all of my
ideas for projects that I'm working on; it's received a lot
of use since I first picked it up, which is great. I get to
draw and write just about anything in there, drawings of
dialogs, program flowcharts, database diagrams. Probably
one of the smartest things I've done in a while in regards
to coding type things.
TOTD
Temple of the Dog - it's my idea for a car MP3 player.
Instead of using the 40x4 LCD display, I want to use a 5"
LCD screen to display everything. I want it to be able to
run games and whatnot, and even let you drop to a shell
prompt for hacking on the go :). Most definitly in the
planning stages, but I've already got the basics of a
Perl::Tk MP3 player, all I have to do is hack it up so that
it looks like I want it to look. I'm also thinking of using
xdaliclock too for the track time, you can get it to count
up and down, which would work great.