|
|
HomeGraffitiAboutSitemapVisualDevWork
Email BrianGPG Key |
GRAFFITI -- October 11, 2004 thru October 17, 2004>> Link to the Current Week <<Last Week << Mon Tues Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun >> Next Week Welcome to Orb Graffiti, a place for me to write daily about life and computers. Contrary to popular belief, the two are not interchangeable. About eMail - I publish email sometimes. If you send me an email and you want privacy or anonymity, please say so clearly at the beginning of your message. |
 
|
MONDAY
Tues
Wed
Thu
Fri
Sat
Sun
October 11, 2004
2212 - Good evening. Shopping today, for a variety of purposes. I went to get fuel for the week, then both home centres for sundry sharpening, sanding, and air tool requirements. Then a quick run by Best Buy for Myst IV Revelation (more on that in a moment). Finally I swept through Sears for a sale on belts and running shoes (both of which were direly needed). Overall, a successful search & destroy shopping mission, male-style. That is, I knew what I was looking for going in, I got what I had on the lists, and I got out with my hide intact. A good run.
Myst IV Revelation (evil Flash plugin required) is a game I've been waiting for for a while. I like the puzzle/adventure genre, and the Myst series is the best of those. Uru was acceptable, but died on the vine. I'm well into Revelation now, and having great fun. The music, incidental and intentional sounds are so well integrated with the stunningly beautiful scenery that I can easily put aside the thoughts of the 8 Gigabytes of disk space I devoted to the installation. Yeah, the game shipped on two DVD's - there's no other option. This is played in the GamingOS (tm), too. I've never gotten a Myst running under Wine.
I'm in flux about where I'm going for the main home workstation operating environment. I'm leaning hard towards going back to a "stable" Gentoo installation, not the "~x86" setup I've been running for months now. The problem with that setup is that it's easy over the long haul to get the system into a state that's hard to debug, like now. Debian with Linux 2.6.8 kernel is fine. Gentoo, with the same kernel, but a lot of bleeding edge stuff including core libraries and GCC, isn't. I'll continue to think on it. Maybe a *BSD would be a good choice, given my upcoming new gig. Oh, and sadly, tomorrow starts my final work week as a NERD in name as well as in deed. After that, I'll just be a geek again (or a lower-case nerd, but that's not the same thing). I'm sure that my choice was the right one for me, though.
Time for bed, as that alarm's going off at 0545. Have a great evening!
Mon
TUESDAY
Wed
Thu
Fri
Sat
Sun
October 12, 2004
2219 - Good evening. Short post brought to you via SSH and Vim, as I'm in the process of rebuilding Gentoo on Goldfinger. There are a number of choices early in the install process that make for a more stable, yet faster 2.6 kernel configuration, so I'm taking advantage of that. Why Gentoo? Well, over the last few years, it's continued to come closest to what I want in a home working environment. There are times when I crave stability and boredom, but Gryphon the Sony laptop running Xandros is providing that part of my needs just fine. So here we go again. At the moment I'm just finished with the bootstrap process of a Stage One install, and I am rebuilding glibc with NPTL capabilities, which should improve a number of programs' operation significantly. This helps a bunch to do so now, so that Threads awareness is compiled into everything going forward. Back to it, have a good evening.
Mon
Tues
WEDNESDAY
Thu
Fri
Sat
Sun
October 13, 2004
2324 - Good evening. Another long day. Stuff for me. Stuff for NERDS. Stuff for Jerry. My review copy of Building the Perfect PC is here. More on that tomorrow. I'm writing this from Goldfinger, so far so good. X is up, fonts are spruced, building apps as we speak. Time for bed, and past time. Have a good evening.
Mon
Tues
Wed
THURSDAY
Fri
Sat
Sun
October 14, 2004
2227 - Good evening. Still charging blindly along. I hung out downstairs this evening, watching CSI on Spike, then on CBS. The former included my favorite line from CSI, Jorga Fox: "I guess she killed you back." Excellent! Tomorrow's the last official uppercase NERD day, and with a couple of longer days this week, I might finish out early tomorrow, one never knows.
Bluefish is pitching segfaults at the moment, so this post is brought to you by Vim. New, improved. Ah, drivel. It must be bedtime. G'night.
Mon
Tues
Wed
Thu
FRIDAY
Sat
Sun
October 15, 2004
2222 - Good evening. There's little to report ... well, litte except that I drove off into the sunset this afternoon at about 3. Okay, it wasn't exactly a sunset, it was a rather gray-ish drizzle, rather disappointingly mundane if you ask me. I was home be a tad after 3:30, and running the "stable" Linux environment fully installed to bare metal, including downloaded and installed latest and greatest Thunderbird, Firefox and VMware. I'm using Xandros Linux as my working environment on both workstation and laptop now, and likely to stay that way for a bit-ish. I'm looking to stop spending so much time mucking about with my working machines, so that I can spend time on software and learning my new gig, and reporting on new things here, there and everywhere. Xandros gets in my way less than any other OS I've worked with. I imagine I might be happy with OS-X, too, but not at those hardware prices. Anyway, from a Gentoo installation that was running but in need of deep attention to bring back to the level I need for full function, two hours of work with Xandros got me virtually everything I need in one whack.
Marcia, Marly and I had steak and potatoes for supper, set to yet another evening of CSI courtesy of Spike. A bit after nine I rolled up here to get Bluefish installed, and put up this little post. But the latest version I was getting from the Xandros repositories was 0.11. While that's not horrid, there's 0.13 that's recently out. I found a Debian package, but the dependencies were for Sarge packages, not Xandros. So I went to the source, picked up the tarball and unpacked it. A couple of passes with configuring the source tree showed me what development dependencies I was missing. I installed those from Xandros stock repositories, built and installed this shiny new Bluefish. Better, faster, more consistent highlighting is the number one improvement I've seen in this short session. Now I'm a bit tired, and I need to rest up for the next 9 days off. Well, 7 days off, then two days of backpacking, then right into the new gig. Is that planning, or what? Hmmm. Something to think about.
Okay, I'm off. Happy Weekend!
Mon
Tues
Wed
Thu
Fri
SATURDAY
Sun
October 16, 2004
1048 - Good morning. My choices for this morning are unlimited, but self-selected down to two: Clean my office or ...
The choice seems obvious, doesn't it? Only a baby-sized Coke, but a definitely "FUN" size candy bar. And the Thompson's new book, Building the Perfect PC (or here, or here, or get/order it from your local bricks-and-mortar bookstore). Get yours today!
1932 - Good evening. It's been a fruitful day. I read through Bob and Barbara's new book, Building the Perfect PC (extensively linked above). Here's the review I'm going to post here and there...
I just put down my copy of O'Reilly's "Building the Perfect PC" by Robert and Barbara Thompson, following a cover-to-cover read. There are a number of reasons for going through this book like a banshee. First off, I'm a System Administrator by trade, and keeping up with the latest best practices in PC hardware is a must. Next, once started, the book is a good read. It flows as well as any highly technical documentation possibly can, with a mix of hard data, diagrams and photos, sidebars and anecdotes. Finally, I've counted on Bob and Barbara to answer my PC hardware questions for years, both personally and via their excellent "PC Hardware in a Nutshell" editions (also from O'Reilly).
The book starts with a Fundamentals chapter that takes a non-partisan look at the whole process of selecting components, tools, and utilities in preparation for a self-built PC. It's got the same feel as a Consumer Reports article: Vendor independent, but the authors are not afraid to recommend their choices for manufacturers in each category of component. One thing I liked very much was the Troubleshooting section in this chapter. In many other works, by the time you've found the Troubleshooting pages back in the Appendices somewhere, it's far too late to be of great help. By bringing that section up front, it helps every reader, from novice to expert, keep an eye out for possible problems before they become troubles that need shooting.
Through the component selection and project chapters that populate the rest of this 300+ page book, there is a wealth of great information. From the painfully obvious "Benchmarks lie." to specifying the correct quiet cooler for an AMD Athlon XP processor, the Thompson's have covered nearly every base. Another standout feature of this book (and a first from O'Reilly) is the superb 4-color printing throughout the book. Most computer works are in grayscale, possibly with one accent color. But there are a few hundred pictures in this book, illustrating each step of building each project PC. Color matters when aligning ribbon cables, getting audio connections right, and in a myriad other little ways. O'Reilly's done every reader a great service in going to the expense of printing this book in full color. Bravo!
The project chapters are Mainstream PC, SOHO Server, Kickass LAN Party PC, Home Theater PC, and Small Form Factor PC. Each project chapter is written and copiously illustrated with images to provide all the guidance needed to get the box built right the first time and running without a hassle. That makes for some repetition when read straight through, but all of the repeats are worth hearing: Ground yourself before handling static-sensitive components, check the motherboard mounts against the hole pattern carefully, and many more lessons well worth deeply embedding. Additionally, while addressing the specific needs of each project, the Thompson's are giving the reader the tools and opportunity to take the vicarious experience of building these systems to meet virtually any type of PC requirement.
I've been building systems for about as many years as Bob has, and I learned new things (as well as refreshed my memory in several areas) from "Building the Perfect PC". Having it as a guide to getting components selected and balanced properly against needs, wants, and budget is a great tool. For the novice or casual system builder, this book will be invaluable.
The only oversight that I caught on this reading was near the beginning, where the authors claim that you can build every project in the book with just a Number One Philips screwdriver. You simply must have some sharp implement, possibly even a bench-mounted sheet metal shear, to open some of the tempest-hardened and atomically welded plastic packaging that some components ship in. I also sent an email to Bob to suggest that with so many fingers and thumbs appearing in the pictures (assembling the computers, inserting cables and memory and whatnot), perhaps a photography class would be suitable. I hope he's wearing his sense-of-humor hat today!
[Disclaimer: I know Bob and Barbara Thompson -- that may lead you to assume there's bias in this review. That's as may be, but if I thought there was a problem with the book they would have heard it from me when I was reading drafts. The finished product is even better than I expected, thanks to the superior production staff at O'Reilly (with whom I have no relationship aside from owning several shelf-feet of their books). It's your grain of salt, do with it as you will.]
Those of you who've read it yourself, have I missed anything important? I'll tell you this, I enjoyed this book because of content, anecdotal verity and the wealth of information, and that's for real. Highly recommended.
Mon
Tues
Wed
Thu
Fri
Sat
SUNDAY
October 17, 2004
1911 - Good evening. It's Sunday, that means... heh, I've got the week off! Woo. So Marcia was up at way-oh-dark-30 (explicitly 0230), to take Marli to the airport for her trip back to Brasil. She was home by 0530, and we slept until about 0900. After a bit of breakfast, we did the morning shopping. After that, the day is a bit of a blur. I'm quite sure I didn't do anything useful until mid-afternoon. Thereafter I started on the assorted stacks of paperwork that have accumulated in my office.
Every two to three months it's time to clean house in my office. Mostly stuff goes in one of two stacks for dealing with shortly - magazines for reading and bills for paying. Neither sit for long. There are, however, the occasional items that meet neither of those categories, yet don't get immediately round-filed. Vetrinary visit receipts, mail from the Smithsonian or the local Shakespeare Theatre or one of the three PBS stations nearby... stuff like that goes into one of two or three holding files until I decide to clean up before archeological expeditions show up to see what's buried.
Computer hardware often shows up in the unstacking process. This time was no exception. The Creative USB camera emerged from some cave or another. That lead to the latest Xandros experiment: Does the webcam Just Work ™, or not. The short answer is yes, it does. The slightly longer answer i s that I had to remember what utility I was using for interfacing with the hardware (camE) and modifying my ~/.camErc file to find the TTF files for annotation. After a couple of false starts, everything came together and the Orb Webcam is back online ... wait, wait, don't run away!
See, it's not anything icky. Boring, yes, but not risque. Usually... One thing I want to do soon is muck about with the motion detection bits and look at the security aspects of webcams.
Shortly after starting on the stacks, I realized that what I really needed to do was sort through the filing cabinet and consolidate a few things, hand off a few other items to Marcia, and archive the folders that don't need to be actively available anymore, like those for our rented houses in Sunnyvale or over on the other side of Bowie, or the vet/receipt file for our beloved, departed Sally. So I went through all that, and now it's time to get into the sorting again. Maybe a spot of dinner first, though. Have a great evening!
Last Week << Mon Tues Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun >> Next Week
Visit the rest of the DAYNOTES GANG, a collection of bright minds and sharp wits. Really, I don't know why they tolerate me <grin>. My personal inspiration for these pages is Dr. Jerry Pournelle. I am also indebted to Bob Thompson and Tom Syroid for their patience, guidance and feedback. Of course, I am sustained by and beholden to my lovely wife, Marcia. You can find her online too, at http://www.dutchgirl.net/. Thanks for dropping by.
All Content Copyright © 1999-2011 Brian P. Bilbrey.
Except where otherwise noted, this site is licensed under the
Creative
Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States
License.