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.
Computing
Computer and technology related topics
2006-07-16 07:27:00
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
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
2006-02-06 07:31:00
Why use FreeBSD
- Compiling everything from source
- Check entire system for vulnerabilities with one command: portaudit
- Upgrade all ports with one command: portupgrade -a
- You can still get a command prompt to respond with a CPU load of 4.00
- it doesn’t crash.
- Runaway processes auto reniced
- Zombie processes die
- Routing faster than consumer hardware routers
- 730 day uptime means you recently rebooted
- Jailed servers in 2 minutes
- GEOM encryption
- …and the list goes on…
Comments [21]
2005-11-27 01:01:00
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
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.
2005-10-05 05:44:00
2005-10-05 05:44:00
“Password may contain only letters (a-z) and numbers (0-9).”
…is what appeared on the website of a well known company rejecting my account creation because my password contained special characters. Needless to say I decided not to trust them with my credit card number and bought the merchandise elsewhere. Come on?! A ‘little’ security?
2005-09-24 18:18:00
2005-09-06 06:41:00
2005-09-06 06:41:00
On the SAVVIS Network
Woo-hoo! Gotta love a network that’s only 2 hops from Dallas to LA.
2005-08-27 15:19:00
2005-08-27 15:19:00
Vanishing Sock Pattern
Name: One of a pair of socks vanishes
Problem: If a pair of matching socks are washed, one will vanish.
Context: Usually occurs after placing socks in washing machine or dryer. If two pairs of socks are washed, 2 socks will vanish in such a way that you will have two half-pairs, or two socks that do not match.
Forces: Unknown forces cause mismatched socks. Two matching socks vanishing is never observed because it is not noticeable.
Solution: Purchase all identical socks of the exact same brand, color, and part number.
Resulting Context: Someone will give you socks of a different color. Problem repeats.
Rationale: The design is based on a vanishing cloth occurance.
Comments [6]