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.