/dev/blog

I kind of feel like starting to blog again, but I always forget.

Oh well...

So it's Spring Break, and since I have time, I figured I'd write a post.

I've spent the majority of my time during spring break moving into my new condo. My parents started the whole "we're gonna kick you out and get you a place" business in January, and we actually bought it about 3 weeks ago. That's when it was actually ours. But then we had to get it painted, the carpets cleaned, and all that crap. I wanted to move in.

Moving basically began immediately after I skipped my Yoga class (because I was sick and there is a policy in that class that if you are sick, you're excused). So we moved shit all weekend long. We basically took our time since my place is less than a mile away from home and we're doing it ourselves. Plus we have a whole week. I didn't actually get my bed in here until Sunday, but I didn't sleep in it until Monday night.

I've pretty much gotten everything I need to survive over here. Tonight my parents and I hung up some posters and pictures that I had and we also moved my DVD shelves. Tomorrow my dad and I are going to poke around in the attic and see if there are any pictures that we have that I might want.

Besides moving, I've been working my normal hours at the library. I still have a backlog of movies that I need to watch and I'm guessing that I won't get to them over this break. Oh well.

(this post written on tunkdogan)

I kind of convinced myself in the period of 10 seconds that I needed to post an entry about how my break is going. So here goes.

My last semester sucked. Sucked hard. I thought it would suck a lot harder than I thought it would, but in the end I came out with better grades than I expected. Except for one. In a bizarre turn of events, much like an episode of 24, my grades kind of splattered everywhere. I basically came to the conclusion around mid November that I cannot handle 15 credit hours. I came to this conclusion about a year and a half ago when I was also taking 15 credit hours at Earlham. That would also be my last semester at Earlham. Next semester I plan on taking 12 or 13 credit hours.

On a happier note, Joe finally set up his Sun, so that got me jealous and pumped. I almost won an Ultra 60 on eBay but was outbid. I'm watching another Ultra 60 right now and I want to win :D

I have a new sweet keyboard.

I almost won a Sun Ultra 60 last night on eBay. It was a sweet machine too.

2x450 Ultrasparc ii
2 GB RAM
18 GB SCSI hard drive
CD-ROM
Onboard ethernet

Starting at $10 or so
$63 shipping :)

I maxed my bid at $50.50 and it ended up gong at $66 or so.

So I've seen Casino Royale three times so far, and I've been very impressed with what I've seen. I saw it opening day with chully and was really pumped. I then saw it this Tuesday, and then again yesterday in Indianapolis with my brother and my cousin.

The movie itself is a departure from previous Bond films, breaking away from the established "Bond formula" since Casino Royale is a reboot to the series. I personally think Daniel Craig is awesome and I really like the movie.

For other "reviews" that I basically agree with, I'll link here and here.

So I cancelled my Facebook account last weekend. Or rather, I suspended it, in their terms. I mainly did it for two reasons. 1) privacy, and 2) protest against the whole Facebook thing

Privacy is my main reason for deactivating my account. I'm basically suspicious of the Facebook collective entity and what they can do with my data. Things that bother me:

• You can only deactivate your account, not actually delete it
  
• They require you to list a reason to why you are leaving
  
• Future employers using stuff that is in my profile and using it against me (blackmail)
  
• From their privacy policy:
  

  Facebook may also collect information about you from other sources, such as newspapers, blogs, instant messaging services, and other users of the Facebook service through the operation of the service (e.g., photo tags) in order to provide you with more useful information and a more personalized experience.

  
  

Coincidentally, I just read an article about Facebook for my C190 class last night.

I did the GCC 4.1 migration on stella last week after it got marked stable and the 2006.1 profile was pushed out. In retrospect, I jumped the gun way too early. There was a bit of package breakage, but most of all, X and my nvidia drivers stopped working and I haven't been able to get them working since. In the meantime, I'm using the nv driver with X. Read on.

I followed the migration guide to a t. emerge -eav system finished fine with no breakage, much to my surprise. Things started falling apart when I recompiled world with emerge -eav world.

These are the packages that failed to compile. I am going to list them if someone happens to stumble upon this post and find this information useful.

=dev-lisp/cmucl-19a-r1
-19c worked for me
games-fps/doomsday
I just unistalled it
=app-arch/unshield-0.2
=gnome-base/gconf-1.0.9
=gnome-extra/guppi-0.4.0.3-r2
-r3 works
=gnome-extra/gtkhtml - I got an access violation. I gave me a path to some html documentation. Deleting all the documentation and recompiling worked
=dev-libs/pwlib-1.6.3-r3
I've read that versions above 1.8.7 works but openh323 wants a lower version. Bugs have been filed
net-libs/openh323
=net-analyzer/iptraf-2.7.0-r1
-3.0.0-r2 works
=media-libs/libdv-0.102
0.104-r1 works

That's all the broken packages.

X.org and nVidia

After I finished all the compilation, I tried starting X, crossed my fingers, but nothing happened. I first realized I had to recompile my kernel (gentoo-sources-2.6.15-r1) with the new toolchain (this made sense since the nvidia module was originally compiled with gcc3 and my version of X that I was using was compiled with gcc4). I did that but no luck. I did get this error:


(EE) NVIDIA(0): The requested configuration of display devices is not
(EE) NVIDIA(0): supported in the hardware.

Fatal server error:
AddScreen/ScreenInit failed for driver 0


*** If unresolved symbols were reported above, they might not
*** be the reason for the server aborting.

Backtrace:
0: X(xf86SigHandler+0x87) [0x80b4dda]
1: [0xffffe420]
2: X(AbortServer+0x23) [0x81a4b72]
3: X(FatalError+0x66) [0x81a505e]
4: X(InitOutput+0x85d) [0x809f846]
5: X(main+0x277) [0x806ffcb]
6: /lib/libc.so.6(__libc_start_main+0xdc) [0xb7d23864]
7: X(FontFileCompleteXLFD+0xad) [0x806f531]

FatalError re-entered, aborting
Caught signal 11. Server aborting


Now, I've already recompiled glibc since all this started, and I'm still getting this error. /lib/libc.so.6 belongs to glibc which is why I bring it up. The only other thing that I find interesting is line 7. I can't really put the pieces together.

The only other idea I have right now is to upgrade my kernel but the nvidia docs say that their drivers work with kernels 2.6.7+ (give or take 2)

libquicktime-0.9.7-unrice.patch

I think it's pretty self explanatory.

Well, another semester of school has started. I'm taking 15 credit hours this semester. The last time I did this was the spring of 2005 at Earlham, when I had Poco and Theory and basically failed Theory and had to drop it. The result of all this is that I transfered to IU and since then I've been hesitant to take a full load. I still feel that I'm moving along rather slowly so I am kind of glad to take 15 hours. It will be a challenge for me but in the end I think the results will be good.

I had a failover class that I added that I could drop if things got hairy: REL-R170: Religion and Ethics, but it isn't really a failover class because I need an ethics course as part of the Informatics core curriculum. The class is all reading and discussion and I think I can handle the reading so I think I'm set. My "real" failover class is a 1 credit Intro to Cybersecurity class that is a second 8-weeks course. But if I drop it now and get screwed later I can't drop anything else because then I'd be below 12 credits.

So I'm taking:
ENG-W131: Elementary Composition
CMCL-C190: Intro to Media
MATH-D117: Intro to Finite II
INFO-I300: Human Computer Interaction
INFO-I130: Intro to Cybersecurity
REL-R170: Religion and Ethics

I've been putting off W131 forever and I need it and finite to technically be enrolled in the School of Informatics.

I'm taking C190 for the Communication and Culture minor. It is a huge class.

D117 is just the second half of finite since I'm taking it in two parts.

Human Computer Interaction is just that. This is a core Informatics course and something that interests me. I feel kind of out of place in this class since everyone seems to be juniors and seniors (which I consider myself), but everyone in my previous Informatics classes were freshmen and sophomores. Having the programming courses transfer from Earlham really helped.

Cybersecurity is an 8 week course that meets once a week starting in October. I've looked online and a lot of it will be guest lecturers.

Religion and Ethics is for my ethics requirement. There was another ethics course in the philosophy department but this one looked more interesting. I think it will be interesting.

All my classes are on the western part of campus which is pretty nice. Wylie, Swain, Ballantine, Chemistry, Sycamore (sort of)

There's also links for Web 2.0 company name and product ideas generator as well as a logo generator, with reflections and beta to boot.

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Reading about workstations on Wikipedia:


*cough* *cough*

WRT54GL

So I bought a WRT54GL so I could have 802.11g and have a "real" WRT54G to mess around with Linux on. About 3 days after I got it I started getting numerous dropped connections on the wireless end every few hours or so. It took hours of deducing before I determined that it was the router's fault. I dropped in my old wired router and everything is peachy. The fact that my brother got his laptop around the same time that I put in the WRT54GL complicated things because it added another thing that I had to check. I'm probably going to return it to Amazon and hopefully get a refund.

Final Fantasy

I have rediscovered the awesomeness that is Final Fantasy, particularly FFVII. I've been playing it via ePSXe since my brother's PS2 doesn't read PSX discs anymore. I had to start a new game and I'm almost at the end of the first disc. I might be able to reach the end of the first disc tonight if I stop watching Bond today :). I've also been playing a little bit of Final Fantasy IX but it got caught up on a FMV sequence and I haven't investigated it any further.

James Bond

This past month has been my James Bond marathon, if you want to call it that. Starting in Michigan, I watched most of You Only Live Twice, and when I got back I've watched all of the films after that, mostly in order. (See Google Calendar for details.) I juggled around Diamonds are Forever, The Man With the Golden Gun, and Tomorrow Never Dies. I put off watching DAF because I really dislike the film, and I put off TMWTGG because my disc is from the first batch which is defective so it doesn't work on my DVD-ROM drive and only on some standard DVD players. Once I'm done watching Die Another Day (which I'm watching now) I'm gonna roll around to Dr. No, continue on to Thunderball, then probably watch the 1967 version of Casino Royale and Never Say Never Again

On a related James Bond note, I saw the current Casino Royale teaser last night and it looks very badass. I read that the pre-credits sequence is the b&w portion that is featured in the teaser and the gunbarrel appears before the title song and not before the precredits sequence. I'm not sure how I feel about this. I'm really looking forward to the film.

durnk............................

I'm back from our week-long vacation to northern Michigan. It was fun. I took about 3 gigs of pictures (RAW+JPEG). I'll post them soonish when I'm less lazy. Maybe I'll post a more descriptive post as well...

I took a lot of sunset pictures and I don't know if they were any good because I've never taken sunset pictures before and the only thing I have to compare to are the excellent pictures in magazines and books and I know I can't stand up to that. There were a lot of photography magazines where we were because the owner of the lodge is an amateur photographer (he has a Nikon) so I flipped through them in my spare time. My tripod is old and kinda jank and the two times I used it were on the beach in the sand -- not very good settings.

I'm still of the opinion that I need a new tripod. One that is lighter and a little easier to set up.

I did get to talk cameras with my younger cousin and it was kind of cool because she was impressed with my camera and I could show it off to her.
I also got to talk computers and Linux with my older cousin's fiance and it was actually nice that I didn't have to go through the whole "Linux introduction" of what Linux is because his brother is really into Linux.

This was the 20th year that we've gone to this place in Michigan and this might be one of the more memorable years because my cousin had her fiance.

I feel dead

So I'm doing research for my final paper in C392 and I naturally hit up Google Scholar. In the past when I've used Google Scholar I've just typed in keywords and browsed and usually come out empty handed. But this time I looked at the Google Scholar preferences. There are two things in there that are important to me.

1. Library link. With this, you can connect to a library, and if that library has the article that you are looking for, a link will appear next to it's entry in the search results. For IU, this is IU-Link (SFX). Anyone who has used IUCAT for a while will recognize IU-Link. This is the page where you are given a number of choices about how to find the item you are looking for.

This is an awesome feature of Google Scholar because I know longer have to search for an article on Google Scholar and then look it up in IU's databases.

2. The second feature is exporting the article to a variety of bibliography formats, including BibTeX. I flipped out at this point because I couldn't really believe it, but on the other hand I could, because it is Google Scholar and LaTeX and BibTeX is mainly used in a scholarly environment.

After discovering these two features I sent off a quick e-mail of thanks to the Google Scholar team :)

I think the RIAA is on steroids. Coming off some huge victories against P2P and thousands of dastardly downloading teenagers, the RIAA is trying to take the definition of copyright infringement a step farther in a new case. If they win on their terms, then you�re probably violating someone�s copyright right now.

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Found this on the DSLRBlog, which I read frequently.

Basically, a photographer, according to the post, is someone who "captures the moment" and goes to the extreme to get the picture. These are the people that win awards and such. A photographist is someone who figures out what all the controls on the camera do and takes them into account when shooting pictures.

I'd say that I'm somewhere in between because I usually just want to capture the moment, so I don't mess with aperture settings or shutter speed that often unless I have these settings in mind when I'm taking the picture.