November 2005 Archives

Okay, this is too fun. Do you read Planet-Geek? Are you a friend or someone connected up with me in some nefarious way? Drop a marker on the map over on Frappr.com. It only takes a second, and there's no signup process.

I had chalked this weekend to put in some work on the MythTV Project. As of mid-day Saturday, it's been a mixed bag of results.

I received my replacement MX4000 AGP card from Newegg right as scheduled, and proceeded to install it into my system. The problem happened when I tried to remove the old card which had gotten pretty badly wedged into the slot. I believe I ended up cracking the slot (an AGP card is a 'double-depth' card, which means it goes pretty far into the motherboard). I installed the new MX4000 card, and apparently didn't quite get it in place properly, because after 5 minutes of use, I was getting noise on the screen and corrupted video. No amount of swapping, reseating, fiddling, or whatever has solved the problem, so I'm RMAing the card back to Newegg, and trying a new one. Alas, I've had to go back to my old nVidia card in the meantime.

On the good side, I did some more work with MythGame the plugin for MythTV that acts as a front end to XMame, a wonderful arcade emulator. After populating the machine with the ROMS I had (all legally, natch), it took some noodling to get MythGame and XMame to configure properly. I've narrowed down a lot of the problems to the fact that the KnoppMyth folks rolled a 'mid-development' version of Myth out with their last ISO image, so many things are only half completed. I won't be able to use the new ROM SQL database stuff yet, but 'big browsing' (using just filenames) -is- working.

I also picked up a pair of Thrustmaster (yes, thats really the name) USB joysticks from CompUSA ($9 each. Cmon), and Debian Linux picked them up automatically. I had to tell XMame to use the joystick (putting 'joytype 1' in /etc/xmame/xmamerc), as well as some other minor tunings (always run fullscreen, here's where the rom dir is, etc etc), but after that it's been working great. I have to decide whether the handheld controllers would be best, or if something like an X-Gaming controller is needed. However, in the time it's taken to write this article, my friend and my wife and my son are now gathered around said system playing Gauntlet II on the handheld controllers. That may have answered my question for me.

Minor update - Something is amiss in my USB setup. The joysticks have a tendency to disappear off the bus and not reinitialize. A hard reboot seems to fix it, but not exactly an optimal situation. Stay tuned.

"Wizard is about to die!". Ahhh.

So a few days ago I posted a link to a fellow who had programmed all his christmas lights in time with a Trans Siberian Orchestra track. I sort of mused, being the geeky fellow that I am, how this could be done in a reasonable budget.

Hackaday to the rescue! They pointed me at this wonderful site that gives full detailed howtos on building controllers to drive your own lights display.

Not that I need another project right now.

Our new team in Seti@Home BOINC processing is cranking away. All the user information has migrated into the BoincStats.com system, and our ranking is rapidly climbing up the ladder. I have to admit seeing full statistics and graphing stuff like this representation of the Stonekeep team is just too cool for words. We're ranked about 17,000 out of 31,000 teams right now, and I expect that'll climb steadily as our total credit keeps going up.

If you haven't joined already, feel free to add your machine to Cluster Computing and Yak-Shaving division of Stonekeep Consulting.

Folks are well aware that I'm not exactly a screaming Microsoft advocate. While I concede they've done more to advance and stabilize the concept of 'Computers for Everyone' than virtually any other manufacturer (save perhaps Apple), they've done so in such a poor, disorganized, and ruthless fashion, it's resulted in a global environment that is virtually impossible to be productive in without spending enormous amounts of time and money on licensing, virus protection, system tuning, configuration, and security auditing.

I offer as evidence, dear readers, my experience trying to set up my son's computer this afternoon. It's installed with a (licensed!) copy of Windows 2000, running on an AMD Duron 850mghz machine with 512meg of RAM. No slouch is this machine, and the goal today was simply to get it to the point where he could run his Reader Rabbit game.

What follows is a Rant. Read at your own risk.

From a pointer noted on gdaniels' LJ.

Remember that 'Fall' flash animation a while back? Well, someone's hacked it up a bit to let you watch your favorite world leader tumble through random painful contortions. Fun for the whole family!

It's the age old conundrum. If you're a guy, and you're looking for friends, dates, or romance on the net, you're immediately at a disadvantage. It's generally up to the guy to take the initiative. So how DO you reply to the personal ad of that wonderfully sexy person on OkCupid or Craigslist and not sound like a total dweeb?

There is help! Enter ClueChick! Her job? Help the poor schmoes like yourself come across as something other than slobbering hordes of testosterone. She's taken on the admirable role of educating the masses on how to function in the online dating scene. Not only how to answer ads, but how to choose which ads to answer, and what to say in those responses.

An excellent read, whether you're on the lookout or just interested in an up front and honest statement about what to do, what not to do, and what to AVOID AVOID AVOID!

Some fellow(s) with too much time on their hands, a lot of christmas lights, and a passion for the Trans Siberian Orchestra managed to choreograph their house christmas lights to the music. This is just masterful.

Check out the the full video in WMV form.

It's rare that I find an online service that I really get sunk into right off the bat, but Flickr.com has me totally roped in.

Some friends of mine have been using it for general picture sharing, and although I knew a bit about it, my experience with other picture sites (Shutterfly, some others) has really left me cold. They try to be a whole-experienc-happy-javascript-flash site, when all I really want to do is post and share pictures.

Flickr has hit the right balance of photo database services, community, and technical features. Not only do they allow quick browsing of your own and other people's pictures, but they also provide tools to link your picture sets into external pages and blogs. I've added links to my Flickr photos in the sidebar on the blog now. Pictures I'm looking to share will definately be posted into Flickr from now on.

Flickr Fun
Here's a neat thing I've found fascinating to do with Flickr. Go to the main page, and click on 'Everyones Photos'. This is a constant stream of the photos being uploaded to Flickr by every user. Refresh it every 5-10 seconds. It's like an around-the-world window into dozens of peoples lives. I probably watched it for almost 2 hours.

I found this posting recently. It talks about a fellow who picks up a hitchhiker and gets a whole new perspective on things. A wonderful read, very thought provoking and honest.

Thanks to Greg Hughes for the pointer.

The legions of Stonekeep minions took on a new dimension today as we set up the Stonekeep Cluster Computing team on Seti@Home. We've got some fairly high-power hardware lying around, so we figure it was time to put all that idle silicon to work and band together.

If you'd like to join, feel free. It's certainly a good cause (I think the Seti project is fascinating in its own right, and this lets folks participate in some small way). I doubt the Stonekeep team will ever compete with the big boys, but I still hope to rack up some good unit counts.

Here's a quick update to my project to build and run a MythTV box.

Today saw what is most likely the last bits of setup on the disk storage. Thanks to a fortuitous woot at woot.com, the main drive is now a 250gig WDC ATA drive. That, coupled with the 40gig drive we originally isntalled on, and a 'portable' 160gig external drive, brings us to the awe-inspiring:

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda1             2.6G  2.0G  459M  82% /
/dev/hda3             4.1G   24K  4.1G   1% /cache
/dev/hdb1             233G   18G  204G   8% /myth
/dev/sda1             147G   43G   97G  31% /external
/dev/hda4              31G   33M   31G   1% /backups

It's not quite half a terabyte. But it's getting mighty close. And I remember the GLEE I had back in the day when I first got 2 hard drives working in my very own PC. 2 20 MEG (that's megabyte) Seagate ST225 drives. I spent time just copying data from one to the other, just to see how fast it was.

This machine has over 10,000x the disk space of that old PC.

(I won't mention the 1300x the amount of memory, and some absurd performance factor between a 8mghz V20-based PC and an AMD Athlon 1400.)

Special thanks, by the way, to Ben for doing a lot of the maintenance work on this box. I know he's got some self-interest in seeing it all work, but he's the one who finally installed the Big Drive, and got it configured properly, as well as the networking work that was required for remote access.

This is a cute little toy. Kayak Buzz lets you type in an airport code, and it'll show you, on google maps, a list of discount tickets radiating out from that airport, color coded based on price. This includes international flights. Nifty.

I'm honestly not sure about the usefulness of this. The listing of the flights available is nice, and it's great for looking up "Hmmm, I think I'd like to go somewhere this weekend", but the map is somewhat hard to view on a reasonable scale. Though the slider for eliminating things based on price is verrahnice.

Thanks to Ringel for the pointer.

This is a fairly personal-type post, but I want to point folks to something Chip said regarding kids and community. Amen brother.

Talk about fun. This fellow has taken a 1948 Sportsman trailer, torn it down to its component parts, rebuilt it, redesigned it, and built it back up again into a beautiful camper. Talk about a wonderful project. I've had dreams of doing similar, perhaps with a sailboat though, but this his photo-log of all the steps the project went through is fascinating.

Found via Boingboing

There's always a sort of tongue-in-cheek banter between boosters of Emacs (aka 'The One True Editor'), and 'vi', the old workhorse that it is. Note that 'vi' has pretty much been replaced by 'vim' (aka 'Vi - Improved!'), as the old version hadn't really been updated in 15+ years.

One of the weapons in this give and take was the vast number of plugins and tools and full-on applications people had written to run inside emacs. Ticket management, email clients, news readers... all written inside emacs. One of those was in a fact an IRC client, so Emacs users could chat online without ever exiting or switching away from their beloved editor.

On a lark, I went looking to see if someone had done the same for vim. Sure enough, VimIRC is a script for vim that... lets you connect and talk to IRC servers inside the vim environment. It's sort of painful actually watching conversations happen in editor buffers (you actually say something on channel by inserting a line into the buffer), but someone had fun doing it.

Inspired by this pool on Flickr, I decided to do some digital camera geeking of my own. This is the end result. I title it "Time To Do The Laundry". I'll add it to the flickr pool tomorrow. Right now I'm too tired and I killed the batteries on my camera during this process.

I think the next step will be to work on a double-shot, using the second monitor as well, but that gets complicated when doing 'skewed' viewing angles. One thing at a time.

Back in the good old days, I thought one of the coolest jobs on the planet would be to run a video game store. You know, always have all the games at your fingertips, tons of cool toys, and everyone would come visit you and talk about games, gaming, and all the fun it was.

There may have been a slight element of self-delusion there.

As if to underline that possibility, there are the wonderful comments of one Gord, the owner of 'Gamers Edge' up in Canada. Although no longer running his store, he faithfully documented the daily fun encountered in his store.

From the introduction:

But the story was not yet over. For some time The Gord and I concurrently kept The Retail Faith. His Establishment maintained, surpassed and soon eclipsed mine in sheer Consumer Idiocy. Tales were told that begged disbelief. "No one," we thought, "Is really that stupid." But the stories continued, and the cries of the wretched grew louder and more plentiful. The stories were true: The Gord had become an Owner in Hell. Witness after Witness held forth tales of lunacy and mental vacuousness.

I knew him as Gord. These were his stories..

The website for the band I play in, Deluded Blues has been revamped. We're looking for gigs! If you have an event you'd like us to play at, drop us a line! We do a mix of blues and classic rock (edging toward blues - Clapton, CCR, Joe Cocker, etc).

Consumer watch alert!

Unscrupulous dealers are trying to foist unofficial Mini Cooper lookalikes on an uninformed public! If you're considering purchasing a new or used Mini, it's important to review this site to make sure you don't fall victim to this scam!

Thanks to Adam and mort for the pointer.

Said yesterday during one of Mosaic's workshops.

There are no problems, only expenses"

A month or two ago, I came across Carl and Phil: Monkey Ninjas and wrote about it. I dropped Devadas George, the creator of the series, a note asking if he'd like to do an interview. Happily he agreed!

This afternoon marks the end of my forced detachment from mobile computing. After a brief stay at the local IBM warranty repair center, hunter, my trusty T40 laptop, is back in my hands and working properly. I had gone about a month and a half dealing with keyboard problems that INCLUDED a keyboard replacement (didn't help), and a kernel upgrade (didn't help but fixed some other things).

I really wasn't aware how much of an impact this was having on day to day life until I had the machine available for remote work again. Now I sit happily at Panera sipping a coffee mocha latte and catching up on email, irc, and blogstuff, all on a new keyboard and stable system.

I'll take this opportunity to point out how much IBM's warranty program rocks. I bought this T40 off ebay about 8 months ago, from Joe Random Seller. When it arrived, it was a simple matter of going to ibm.com, typing in the serial number, and noting that yes, in fact, it's under warranty for another 2 years. That means just about anything that breaks will be free to repair, either via ordered parts (shipped to me for free overnight), or via carry in service (ala a motherboard replacement). Turnaround at the service center was 2 days (though 1 day is normal - the mobo came in late yesterday), and cost to me was $0.00.

Hard to argue with that.

There's hardly a more contentious subject among the geek crew than "What IRC client is best?" I suppose "Which Linux distribution is best" may eclipse it, and lets not even talk about 'What's the best editor?'. But the IRC client argument certainly ranks up there.

Recently my trusty laptop 'hunter' went in to the local shop for some repairs. My keyboard problems had become too much to ignore, and a new keyboard didn't fix it. So off to the local IBM Warranty repair office for a new mainboard.

This of course leaves me to work on the red-headed stepchild in Chez Geek, my ShuttleX Windows XP system. Now, normally this box simply runs Seti@Home, or tests out viewing pages in IE, or runs Azureus, but today it needs to belly up to the bar, and actually do -work- for me.

Naturally, the first thing required is a decent IRC client. Priorities, yanno.

I'm a fervent user of X-Chat, the excellent GTK based IRC client by Peter Zelazny. Were I on my Linux box, there's no question what I'd run. Alas, Pete decided a while back that building under Windows was too much of a hassle (and, to his credit, it is), and changed the licensing agreement on the product so that Windows users had to pay for the official builds of the client (the Linux version was still free). Needless to say this annoyed a lot of folks who are forced to use Windows.

Ah, but the joys of the GPL come to the fore. Since the application is licensed under the GPL, anyone can pull the source and build it and offer it for distribution, and someone has done just that.

The folks over at Silverex.org are providing up to the minute rebuilds of the Xchat client for windows. Latest versions are online and install cleanly without a license or hassle.

I'm happily running Xchat on my windows desktop now. On to pillage...

No, not quite what you think. Click on the image for a video served from google vids. Mighty good work.

Thanks to Tom for the link...