Geeky Stuff

Long live the penguin!

I installed Linux on my Powerbook G4 last night. This was rather painful because the optical drive on the laptop is hosed, and Yellow Dog doesn't support installation from an external firewire CD-ROM (like OSX does), so I had to do some heavy hacking.

To make a long story short, I ended up doing a network install over http from hushpad, by loopback mounting the iso images (in order) inside hushpad's webspace. It worked pretty well, though it was a major kludge, and got the OS installed. Whee!!

Linux on a G4 867 is fast as hell. It feels a lot faster than OSX, but of course doesn't have a lot of the pretty eye candy, which makes sense. The primary downside to LinuxPPC is the lack of a Macromedia Flash plugin for the architecture; for some reason they don't just compile the thing on a PPC to make the community of Linux PPC users happy.

My next goal is to get MacOnLinux working. This lets you boot up MacOS X *INSIDE* LinuxPPC. Should be fun!

MumBASA!!!

So this has been a slow weekend. A combination of feeling a bit cruddy and the blistering heat outside has discouraged me from venturing outdoors, so I've caught up on some valuable goofing-off time.

I've really enjoyed the "Father of the Pride" DVD set, which has the entire series on a single RSDL DVD. The image quality of the DVD is a sight to behold; Dreamworks really did an amazing job on this series and it saddens me that it didn't become popular enough to sustain itself. It had pretty good ratings numbers, but the show was too expensive to survive with those numbers. {:(

I've taken a good number of screencaps from the DVD; basically the top half of thumbnails, up to the one with the two tiger cubs, are from the DVD, the rest were lifted from the Dreamworks Fansite. A fun show; if you pick up the DVD set, be sure to watch "The Lost Episode"; NBC pulled the plug so suddenly that they were halfway through production of an episode (recorded, but not animated) when it happened, and they ended up with a storyboard-only episode!

On the geeky side, I'm trying to find a video card, preferably Nvidia, that will drive dual DVI and TV-out at the same time. No luck yet; the only card I've found that'll do that costs $600; for that much I can build a whole other computer to handle the video! I'm also considering building a gaming system, which would of course run.. *shudder*.. Windows XP. I suppose if I only play games on it, I'll be mostly safe from the insecurity of Windows, but it'll still feel icky to run it. I haven't owned a Windows system since 2002!

Father of the Pride, iPod goodness...

A relatively uneventful weekend...

Crappy weather Saturday kept me indoors. Visited some friends and hung out watching TV and eating pizza, but nothing much exciting happened.

I picked up "Father of the Pride" on DVD. For those with short memories, this was a computer animated prime time TV show last year on NBC, about the private lives of the animals that live with Siegfried and Roy in Las Vegas. It was a really fun show, but it didn't make high enough ratings to justify the $1.5 million per-episode production cost, so it was cancelled. The quality of the DVD is astounding, though, and they even have an additional episode that was storyboarded and recorded, but never animated; it's fun to watch an episode in boarded form. I guess my inner animation geek is coming out here. }:)

I got an iPod recently. Fun toy! I don't use it with iTunes, but rather with GTKpod, which is vastly superior. It lets you do nifty things that iTunes doesn't, and is cross-platform to boot!

Didn't make it out to VSW this weekend, and I'm smacking myself for that. However, I needed to take a break from it; was neglecting too many other things I was falling behind on.

Why I like my iPod, or: How to carry 90 minutes of music in your cargo-pants pocket


The Sony WM-8: Listen to tapes on the go!

...yes, a really big pocket.

Or strapped around your neck and shoulders like a purse!

We have here something I found when cleaning yet MORE crap out my closet: An original Sony WM-8 cassette walkman. As I looked over it, boggling at how huge it is, and how much power it uses (requiring 4 AA cells), it reminded me of my iPod, in that it doesn't have an AM/FM tuner!

Yup, this was one of the first Sony Walkmans. (Walkmen?) It only played tapes; no AM/FM. No 5000 songs in your pocket. Nothing; just tapes, 90 minutes a pop at most. It was cutting edge for the early 80s, too, having a Normal/Metal (CrO2) switch. No Dolby B noise reduction, though; that probably would have reduced battery life to an hour instead of the two or three the four AA cells gave you.

Of course, you couldn't just clip this on your belt, or put it in your pocket. It was too huge and heavy to do any of those things. Nope, you had to strap it on, much like a lady would wear a purse. Note the heavy duty kevlar straps. Well, at least they remind me of kevlar; I doubt they actually are.

This thing served me well as a kid; if I recall, it was an xmas present when I was still in grade school. I listened to all the tapes I recorded off the radio using my boom box, another staple of the 80s. Who knows how many AA cells I went through! And they're probably still in a landfill somewhere, faithfully leaking mercury into the environment.

In 1982, this was an amazing technical achievement. I mean, holy crap, a tape player you could carry around with you and listen with headphones! People were practically shitting themselves trying to get these when they came out. I wonder what would happen if I went back in time and waved my iPod at them?

Hee. One can dream, right?

Damn spammers!

So, some asswipes have decided to start spamming comments into this site, advertising things like gambling sites, jewelry, and viagra. I've deleted all the comments and found it was all coming from one IP, and banned it from talking to my site (along with everything else in that /24).

It's unbelievable. Spammers don't stop with e-mail, they insist on spamming people's PERSONAL WEBSITES too. If it keeps up, I'm gonna have to set up captchas, or change the posting method so that robots can't spam as easily. Arrrrgh.

Nifty Anime, tropical storms, etc...

So the Busch Gardens trip was postponed a week due to a potentially incoming tropical storm. Major suckage; I was really looking forward to it! Of course, a shut-down park due to storms is no fun at all either! A whole other week to wait... Arrgh. In any case, hopefully I'll get some time in at VSW this weekend, if the weather holds up.

I discovered an old anime called "Daishizen no Majyuu Bagi", or "Bagi, the Monster of Mighty Nature". A reasonably high quality fan-sub of it can be downloaded via BitTorrent here. It's an interesting story about a guy's friendship with a genetically engineered cat/human hybrid. It was made in 1984, and thus has that "old style" anime look, but is still a very enjoyable story.

Been working on mail servers, file servers, and more at work. We have recently purchased three SATA-based Dell Poweredge 1800 servers, each with 1.25TB of useable disk space, for various projects. It's amazing when you realize how much space 1.25TB really is; 1,250GB or 1.2 *MILLION* megabytes. Remember when the biggest hard drives were 10MB and cost as much as a new car? Yeow!

Our new tape system is also finally ordered and I'll be setting that up sometime in the next few weeks. Definitely looking forward to supercharging our backup system...

Might as well mess with phishers...

I'm sure we're all familiar with phish sites, which are basically scam sites set up to bilk people out of the credit card information or PayPal account so the thieves can rip them off...

Well, I figured I might as well start messing with the phishers.

The full text for the fields where you can't see it all was:

  • Not only do you want to steal the eBay account, but the actual CC info too
  • Why don't you get a job instead of ripping people off?
  • Yeah, they may be dumbasses to fall for this, but they don't really deserve it....

I recommend everyone start doing this; if we start sending the phishers lots of bad data, it'll make their scam-pulling more difficult. }:)

24, Lost, sshfs, and Gravity

Lotsa stuff in one post here...

Saw the season finales of 24 and Lost this week. 24 answered all the questions, and Lost created a bunch of new ones, just as I expected. Hopefully the next seasons will be even better; I haven't been hooked on TV shows like this in a long time!

I discovered something spiffy for Linux today, sshfs-FUSE. In short, it lets you mount, as a filesystem, any directory you want on any system you can SSH to! I've already used it to mount zorin.org's web and my home directory there on my home machine so I can easily move files back and forth without having to use clunky ol' scp!

It supports pretty much all functions, and I haven't found any major issues so far. The only caveats are that it doesn't do directory sizing (so du doesn't work) and that it can't check free space on the disk, so df doesn't work either. Not a big loss, though...

On Saturday June 11th, I shall be roadtripping up to Tampa with some friends to ride this. Sheikra is the biggest roller coaster in Florida, so obviously I can't miss out. I wonder if I can smuggle a video camera on board.... probably not a good idea as it may decide to disappear, then conk some poor guy in the head while he stands on the ground. Heh.

Lots to look forward to! Whoo!

You just can't make this shit up...

This trouble ticket came in today. Seriously, you just can't make this up...

    I am a student at university park and I am trying to upload my database
    onto my unix account at solix. I am having a little trouble getting the codic
    from my diskette to the unix server. First I tried loading the files onto the
    pc then cutting and pasting them onto the unix account using the pico command.
    I found that I could not cut or paste.
    SO now what I am trying to do is open a vax account with the pine command and
    sending the codic via email, but I cannot login to pine. the username and
    password are invalid. please help me find a way to upload my database. there
    are alot of programs for the gcc complier in c++.

Here's an explanation of what's wrong with this, for the non-technically minded:

  • We don't support solix, only Computer Science systems. But barring that...
  • What the heck is a "codic"? And if he meant codec, what does that have to do with databases?
  • You're trying to cut and paste files through pico? pico is a text editor! Unless it's a text file, good luck!
  • A VAX account? We haven't had a VAX system on this campus in about seven years.
  • Even if we had a VAX system still, since when do you use PINE to open an account on them?
  • If you can't log into your email account, how in the heck did you send this message? (yes, it came from their campus email account)
  • Yes, there's a lot of C++ programs out there. What does this have to do with anything?

Wow. Seriously, every time you think you've seen it all, something like this surprises you again. Jeeez!

Star Wars!

So I went to a midnight showing of Episode III with some friends last night. All I can say is...

KICK ASS.

Lucas made up for the relative suckitude of Eps I and II with this movie. It was a non-stop rollercoaster ride the whole way through. And it leads beautifully into Episode IV.

I'm going to have to see this again in the theater before its run is over. And I'll definitely be picking up the DVD when it comes out!

There was lots of fun before the movie, with fans dressed in costume doing mock lightsaber battles in front of the screen... Unfortunately, it seems that all but two lightsabers were low on batteries! Still fun, though, and lots of cheering from the audience.

No spoilers here; it's still too early. Just go see the movie and get blown away. It's worth every penny even at the outrageous ticket prices these days...

Syndicate content