Computing

2006-07-26 06:56:00
Sitting in the dark again
…another power failure. Bob and I are sitting here in the dark. Temperature is rising. …but at least we have internet.

2006-07-16 07:27:00
our power went out! but at least the internet still works! …hopefully our battery will last.

2006-02-09 17:59:00
Automated Smileys get the Annoyance Award

Smileys used to be cool. You could be creative. You could give them eyebrows so they would like like this:
¦:-) or this |;-)

Now, thanks to the wonderful world of automation we get uggly yellow faced critters following horizontal lines:
¦😀 |😉
This caused me to use smileys without noses so that the parser wouldn’t pick them up:

|: ( they’re sad, they don’t have noses ¦; (

Comments [13]

2006-02-06 07:31:00
Why use FreeBSD

1. Compiling everything from source
2. Check entire system for vulnerabilities with one command: portaudit
3. Upgrade all ports with one command: portupgrade -a
4. You can still get a command prompt to respond with a CPU load of 4.00
5. it doesn’t crash.
6. Runaway processes auto reniced
7. Zombie processes die
8. Routing faster than consumer hardware routers
9. 730 day uptime means you recently rebooted
10. Jailed servers in 2 minutes
11. GEOM encryption
12. …and the list goes on…

Comments [21]

2005-11-27 01:01:00
From the Jack Brown Labs…
Slaving away for CS572…
01:01am, Sunday morning. We have put in over 75 hours already this week. A second all-nighter for us.

We have been loading data into the database for the last 3 hours. I’m staring to work on some of our query statements. We’re hoping to be done in time to make it to church in the morning…

2005-10-12 06:21:00
PC-BSD

Being a strong advocate of FreeBSD and hearing some good about PC-BSD I decided to give it a shot since I needed to install FreeBSD on my notebook anyway.

The install process is GUI! I don’t like GUI installs designed for right-handed mice.

…anyway, it never asked for my drive geometry which FreeBSD always does (and I always have to fix it). PC-BSD booted fine, usb-mouse and scrolling were setup for me. I had to manually edit the XF86Config file to use my ATI card and had to set the resolution to 1280×800. Hardware acceleration did not work (as usual for ATI’s in BSD). Not as good as Ubuntu as far as setup but better than a lot of other Linux distros.

To my dismay when I tried booting into Windows something choked the bootloader. I tried rebooting and now all it said was bad boot sector. I tried to reinstall Grub, and use fixmbr but both failed to write. A quick fdisk seems to show the problem:

Partitions Goofed

I wanted to reinstall anyway. Next come licensing issues. Here I accidently used the wrong XP CD (what’s the difference between Corp and Pro anyway) so I had to start all over:
XP bad key

…and iTunes apparantly will only let me do this 3 more times. iTunes auth

…and the ACER-branded XP CD decided that I wanted one large partition …parted fixed that easy enough.

Partitioning
All in all, the reinstall wasn’t too bad. But I would hold off on trying PC-BSD again until the next release. It does look like it has some potential.