Geeky Stuff

Here is my Windows 3.1 desktop from August 1995.

Holy crap! I had forgotten I took this one. A little glimpse into the computing world I was in back then. Funny how ugly and dated Windows 3.1 looks when compared to modern operating systems.

At this point I had been on the net for only a few months. Trumpet Winsock was the app of choice for accessing the net on Windows 3.1 machines at the time! Netscape is there in all its glory, as is Eudora for mail, Ewan for telnet (many hours were spent MUCKing Ewan'ed into wakko.gil.net), Agent for reading Usenet, among other things....

All geeks have to have their copy of the "Star Trek: The Next Generation Guide", conveniently in Windows Help (.hlp) format... Applewin is present for emulating Apple II computers, and of course Telemate was the de-facto terminal program for DOS back then. It didn't run that well under Windows but I left the icon around anyway.

Gah, I'm nostalgic about the silliest things sometimes...

It seems some idiots are trying to break into my Drupal site. It looks like this is some sort of a worm bot, though why it's using usernames like "purchase vagina", I'll never know.

Luckily the site seems to be holding up under this attack; I'm going to start blocking the IPs involved to reduce the log spam this is causing.

I keep wondering when I see this sort of thing.... Why the hell don't people have better things to do with their time??!

I upgraded my Mac Pro to the ATI X1900, for better performance all around. Better performance indeed; every little bit of lagging the machine previously had has vanished. It's running like a dream!

Apple says you can't run Nvidia and ATI cards in the same machine at once. But.. who am I not to try something just because I'm told not to? HA! Screw that.. I put the Nvidia 7300GT in another slot, and.. well...

It worked!

Plugged a CRT in as a third head and had three displays going at once. Unfortunately I can't get TVout working on the 7300GT (not sure if it's even supported) but now I know I can theoretically run four heads on my Mac Pro if I want!

Heh, nifty. Of course, better keep the 3D applications on the x1900 heads for better performance, though...

I'm probably going to pull the 7300GT out for now, unless I get additional flat panels, because there's no reason to have it there using power and generating heat if it's not being used.

It's a geek-out saturday for me, for sure...

Rawr! Well, it's been a while since I've written in depth, really. A lot has been going on lately.

Work has been a bit crazy, with the beginning of Fall Semester and all that. We've had some hardware failures and power failures and have been kept on our toes pretty much the entire time. Looks like things have settled some, though, so it may be time to start pushing ahead on long term projects once more.

I got myself a Mac Pro. To say this machine is fast would be an incredible understatement. Four 2.6GHz cores working together mean processing muscle is never far away. The video board is a bit low end (Nvidia 7300GT) but I hope to eventually correct that when the ATI X1900 becomes cheaper. Second Life runs amazing on this machine; even a crowded Luskwood still exceeds 10 most of the time. My Macbook Pro can barely get 4 on the worst days. Not bad!

I will be at Midwest FurFest. So if you want to say hi, look for me. Though I'll probably be hiding out with close friends half three-quarters of most of the con.

Also, I met someone very special through Second Life. She lives far away, but so far things are promising. Distance can be always be fixed when people finally find their true mate in life. ;)

-Zorin the Lynx, Ph.Cat.

Let the rape begin! A kitten music video I had on my site was linked from Yahoo Video. I was pushing out 40 megabits peak with no signs of stopping until I removed the offending file.

Wow, talk about crazy. I'm a bit proud of my server, even though it was savagely abusing my employer's bandwidth. Luckily, no harm was done, but... Damn!

40 megabits! To the Internet!

Purrrrr.

Since I got my DSL, until a few days ago, all network traffic between home and work (FIU South campus, a five minute drive away) travelled all the way up to Atlanta or Washington before coming back. This resulted in roundtrip times of 90-120ms just to talk to machines on campus only a quick drive away!

This was annoying until a few days ago when Bellsouth started peering at the downtown NAP of the Americas, the same place FIU gets transit through! My roundtrip between home and work is now 9ms, and working on machines at the "other location" feels local!

It's damn sweet, especially since I tend to work from home pretty often. I've measured 800K/sec downloading from FIU hosts and it also makes working on the systems in general a lot easier. Also, peering so close to home means the connection feels faster in general as packets don't have to go to Atlanta or Washington before continuing on their way.

Gotta love it when ISPs actually implement INTELLIGENT network topologies for a change...

I shuffled some things around, including moving the hardware picture archive to this server. I also threw up the artwork of Zorin over the years page and added a "Furry Stuff" category.

Up next, moving the Lynxie Photo Archive to this server. Mmm, I love having lots of hard disk space.

I've been a busy kitty; haven't updated too much lately. I figured I'd summarize what's been happening at least...

Went to Jacksonville the weekend before last. It was fun; I hung out with some friends there and we went bowling, goofed off in general and had a good time. On the way home I stopped in Orlando to visit someone else and we went to a Sushi bar for dinner. Spicy tuna rolls yum yum.

Last weekend I visited some friends in Chicago! It was tons of fun; especially the visit to downtown. Also got to eat dinner at the Signature Room on the 95th floor of the John Hancock tower! The view from up there is amazing; I'll be sure to post photos as soon as I get them; I took them with someone else's camera.

Now it's time to get back into the grind; my next trip will likely be MidwestFurFest in November, and that's a long way off. I'm most looking forward to my trip to California for Further Confusion in January, though; that promises to be fun since I'll be meeting some folks I've been wanting to meet in person for years now.

I've purposefully made sure that this has been a slow weekend. Have been mostly goofing off at home, DJing in Luskwood on Second Life and relaxing. After not spending a single full day at home in three weeks, I needed it!

Usually folks keep some crap on their keyboard shelf. This is the area above the function keys on a PC keyboard. For most people it's useful stuff that comes in handy often, like pens. But I'm not most people:

From left to right:

• 16MB of RAM in four 4MB 30 pin simms. This was the memory in FluffMUCK's machine for a good part of the late 90s. If you were on Fluff then, your ass was generally resident on one of those chips.
• Am5x86/133 CPU. This was the processor that ran FluffMUCK for much of the late 90s.
• i386DX/33 CPU. This is the CPU from my first dedicated Linux box. I administered FluffMUCK from this machine often.
• Badge from Duchess, a former Windows 2000 machine.
• A stray jumper
• A blue sharpie.

And thus ends this pointless post. Yes, it's a very slow day. By ghods it's slow.

I salvaged an Am5x86/133 CPU from some old equipment I'm throwing out. The funny part is right on the chip it says:

"Designed for Microsoft Windows 95"

...complete with a Windows logo.

Huh? How can a processor be designed for an operating system? Isn't it the other way around? I believe AMD processors were designed to be as Intel-compatible as possible; I doubt Windows had much to do with it other then precursory software testing.

It almost makes me hesitant to have this on my desk as a trinket; that ugly Windows logo will be staring at me the whole time!

Curses!!

-Z