Month: June 2004

And #173, Get A Life

Ugh, I really need to make a to-do list. Not that any of you would care, but I have to keep reminding myself…

  1. Get a haircut.

    Sorry J, but long hair is more of a nuisance than anything else. I really should get it done more often (last time was around Christmas), but I hate getting my hair cut. I hate my awkward attempts to make small talk. I hate trying to answer ‘how do you want it?’ when I have no real clue or preference. I hate being touched that way.

  2. Get an eye exam and new frames.

    It’s been a long time since my last exam and although my vision hasn’t deteriorated much, if any, it wouldn’t hurt to get the prescription up-to-date. And it’s way past time to ditch the aviator frames. I may be an uber-geek, but there’s no need to broadcast it so blatantly. :-P They’re getting fairly warped and beat-up anyway.

  3. Get new shoes

    It’s probably a bad thing when there’s a hole worn almost all the way through the sole… I really should put more effort into finding a *good* pair of shoes though, that won’t completely fall apart within a year. I’ve traditionally gone with Reebok walking shoes, but the construction didn’t seem all that great on this last pair, and I’ve heard good things about the Rockport ‘World Tour’ shoes.

  4. Take the Class 7 permit exam

    A Class 5 may be a ways off yet, but I should at least get the Class 7 redone just to start the timer on the probationary period, if nothing else. Now I just need to find the time to study and take it…

  5. Clean up and organize around the apartment a bit more

    Miraculously enough I’ve managed to keep the place reasonably decent, but there are still a few things to take care of. In particular are bunches of things like CDs, manuals, DVDs, etc. that get shuffled around from spot to spot a lot, often winding up just sitting on the floor by the desk. I need to clear out some more closet space for the manuals and get some racks for the discs, at least.

  6. Buy some new jeans.

    It’s almost comical just how poorly my current pairs of jeans fit me. I could probably shelter homeless people in them. It’s hard enough just holding them in place long enough to get the belt looped.

  7. Restart the diet

    Hovering around a point is perfectly fine, but finishing off that last 15-20 lbs first would be even better.

  8. Shoot myself in the head.

    For not already taking care of this stuff regularly at my age…

Does It Get HBO?

Though I’m not much of a Mac zealot, there were still a few things out of the WWDC announcements yesterday that caught my interest:

Cinema Displays: Oooo, widescreen. And, uh, HUGE — that 30″ screen is bigger than my living room TV! That one is overkill (meant for professional editing and such) and beyond my tech specs anyway, and the 23″ is still rather expensive, but the 20″ one is intriguing. I wouldn’t be able to use it with the iBook, but their switch to DVI makes it a viable choice on a KVM for the rest of the systems, and the hubs certainly don’t hurt. The new stand is also a lot better than the old ‘easel’ style that I thought was rather silly-looking and hard to adjust.

It is, though, just one more possibility out of a field of contenders for LCD screens, and I doubt I’ll be picking one up soon anyway. My ViewSonic 17PS may be getting old, but it still serves very well with a high-quality picture, so there’s not much of an incentive to switch to an LCD at the moment.

Spotlight: Hah, looks like Apple’s going to beat MS to getting metadata search capabilities (it won’t be in Windows until Longhorn in 2006ish). The devil is in the details though, and its usefulness will depend on how good it is at extracting useful metadata from files (will it be able to search based on GIF/JPG comments? EXIF headers? Comments in text-based files?).

Automator: Now this could be very useful. There have been times where I’ve wanted to repeat a task a bunch of times, and I knew I could probably do it in something like AppleScript, but I didn’t want to have to stop, refresh my memory on the scripting syntax, write the script, experiment, debug it, etc… This sounds like it would nicely cover that gap where something’s annoying to repeat by hand, but manually scripting it feels like too much work.

Too Close, So Far

I know a lot of people on the Net. Or, rather, I know *of* a lot of people. Would I call these people friends? Not many of them; I don’t really know them at a sufficiently personal level to think of them as friends. Acquaintances, then? Some of them, certainly. Many though, are people I know of by having been led to them through some other means (search engine, posting, referral, etc.) and they in turn aren’t necessarily even aware of my existence. A ‘fan’ then, perhaps.

On the Net though, everyone is equal. When someone’s name comes up via a comment or a link or such, it’s not immediately clear just what the relationship is; there’s often no distinction between a lifelong pal, a beer buddy, an acquaintance, or plain old hangers-on. As a result, someone’s circle of friends can appear to be larger than it really is.

This can lead to some odd behaviour, at least so far as I’ve seen. If a particular topic of interest comes up, someone may be inclined to comment on it. But, given the circles of friends that are already established, that person may also be afraid of overrepresenting their relationship with this group, and feel uncomfortable posting. Why would they care what some random bozo barges in and says, after all? Who are you to just show up and start spouting off? But, on the other hand, how else do connections get established in the first place? These circles had to start somewhere and develop somehow. Plus, those circles may not actually be as strong as they might seem to an outsider, due to the effect above.

I would imagine that there’s at least some portion of the Internet population who *want* to reach out to other people, but are afraid to, but for reasons that are often illusiory, but difficult to clarify. The question is, how do you break the cycle…

Smooth

Whoo, fully upgraded from Slackware 9.1 to 10.0 in just under two and a half hours. And without rebooting, even — uptime is still 77 days and counting…

The only major pain was updating config files in /etc, but even then the differences were pretty minor (Slackware’s major draw is that it keeps things pretty simplified and straightforward for power users, so there aren’t umpteen zillion layers of wrappers that get completely rewritten from release to release). The only annoying one was Apache, due to some loadable modules being moved around.

Now to see what all the hubbub over GNOME 2.6 and the new Nautilus is… Tomorrow. Zzzzz….

Update:
So far only two things seem broken: SpamAssassin had to be reinstalled because it likes to hardcode paths to the Perl library directories when you ‘make’ it, and the session startup path to ‘gkrellm’ had to be adjusted since it’s an official package now and thus moved from /usr/local/bin to /usr/bin.

I don’t really like the new ‘spatial’ method of traversing folders in Nautilus in GNOME 2.6; I like my directories deep and don’t want six gazillion windows open just from browsing through them. Fortunately though, it’s configurable. Somewhere…

Thanks For The Quick Turnaround…

A bit over a month ago I placed an order for the iRiver iGP-100 from a dealer in the States, and only just now did I get a notice that they’ve cancelled the order due to the item being discontinued.

Gee, thanks. Yes, it may be an older item, but when you claim you have some in stock and allow me to order it, I’d expect to, you know, actually receive one…

So, the search is on yet again. It’s a shame too, since the iGP-100 hit pretty much the perfect price/feature point for me, and they don’t appear to be interested in continuing that line of players.

Not Quite So Portable

Hmmm, maybe carrying my camera around in my jacket isn’t such a good idea after all. The extra movement is already causing some of the print on the dials and such to rub off. I have a case for it, but then it’s too bulky to carry around in the jacket anyway.

Ah well, I think I’ve already photographed everything vaguely interesting in my daily life anyway… Time to dig through the archives.

Fat Fingers And Laptops

I like my iBook well enough, but dammit, whenever I’m typing I often accidentally hit the up arrow whenever I go to press the Shift key. If done in the wrong order, this causes the whole previous line I just typed to be highlighted and then overwritten by the next character I type before I notice what’s happening. Grrr…

Maybe I need to take proper touch-typing lessons. You’d think after all this time I’d be good at it, but my fingers are still mostly all over the place…

My PC Has Turned To The Dark Side

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic is a great game, but it’s still pissing me off mightily. Why? Simple, it seems like I can’t go five minutes without the stupid thing crashing on me… It crashes when it loads new areas. It crashes at the start of cutscenes. It crashes if I look at it funny.

It’s somehow related to the video drivers, since the debug dump is almost always in ‘atiogl.dll’ or something like that, the ATI OpenGL subsystem. Reverting to the previous version of the ATI Catalyst drivers helps; it now only crashes every dozen or so area changes instead of every other one. Except that there’s a bug in that version of the drivers that makes the frame rate choppy…

Ugh, this is part of what’s driving people to develop and play games on consoles like the X-box instead. Its version of KoToR certainly doesn’t have these problems…

Update: Although the latest ATI Catalyst drivers are version 4.6, I apparently have to go back *four* whole releases to 4.2 if I want KOTOR to be stable and run smoothly. Wheee…

Sony Finally Wakes Up

I’ve written before about how disheartening EverQuest has become lately, and it looks like there’s finally some acknowledgement from Sony themselves that there’s something fundamentally wrong going on. They recently invited a bunch of high-profile players from the community (high-end guild leaders, experts in particular classes, etc.) to visit them at a summit to try and work out just what’s wrong with EQ nowadays and what can be done to try and fix it.

Here’s one report of the summit from the perspective a community leader of enchanters, the class I play. Some smaller improvements are coming soon, though nothing really substantial yet about the ‘big picture’, but at least they’re listening and acknowledging that things could be improved…

The New Old Version

Firefox 0.9 is out now, for better or for worse (good: bugs fixed, bad: hideous new default theme).

On the Windows version, they made a slight goof though. It looks like it imports all of the previous configuration settings, but the version of the browser reported in the user agent string is one of those settings, so it continues to identify itself as Firefox/0.8 if you do an upgrade from 0.8. OOPS.

The OS X version seems to report the correct version after an upgrade, though.

If someone really needs to tell the ‘fake’ 0.8s apart from the real 0.8s, the ‘fake’ 0.8s also have ‘Gecko/20040614’ as part of the user agent string.

A Mystery

Hmmm, I seem to have a stowaway on my Windows partition. A drive was making odd sounds so I went to check the Event Viewer for any warnings (it turned out just to be the image preview application doing very inefficient I/O) and I noticed a start message for a device driver named ‘nenum13E’. Odd. It doesn’t have a meaningful service description associated with it, either. Strange. Google turns up nothing, so it’s not a well-known program, and could be a randomly-generated name. Suspicious. And it runs out of a temporary directory. *Very* suspicious.

A virus scan doesn’t note anything unusual, though. The other major possibility is spyware, but neither Ad-Aware nor Spybot pick anything up either. That’s unlikely anyway since I’ve always been up-to-date on security patches and don’t use that system very much for browsing.

It should be safe enough to delete it, since nothing system-critical should be running out of a temporary directory. :-P I’m still curious as to what it actually is, though…

The Quest For Quiet

It’s upgrade time again. This time around though, it’s not really about performance; although it’s over two years old, my Athlon system is still pretty much fast enough for the games I want to play. No, this time around the upgrades are focusing on getting some FRIGGING PEACE AND QUIETstability and noise abatement.

Upgrade #1: Power Supply

I’ve been experiencing a number of weird crashes and spontaneous reboots recently, and I think a large part of the problem was that the power supply simply wasn’t keeping up. 300W might have been good enough when I originally put the case together, but a lot has been added to it since then. Thus, the first step was to replace it with an Antec TruePower 480 unit.

It’s hard to tell whether it’s helped with the stability or not yet since the crashes were rather sporadic, but it certainly couldn’t hurt. It’s also has low-noise fans, which help a bit, but not entirely (see below).

Upgrade #2: Memory

Bumping the memory from 512M to 1G has vastly improved playability in a few cases, and EverQuest in particular. No more choppy framerates or disk thrashing leading to facing the wrong direction, casting too late, timing out while zoning, etc.

Upgrade #3: CPU

Okay, this round *is* partly about performance… Since it wasn’t really a priority I didn’t want to have to go all the way and do complete memory and motherboard replacements as well at a much higher cost, so instead I just went from an Athlon 1700+ to an Athlon 2400+, the highest Socket A CPU this same motherboard supports. Not really necessary, but it was cheap. According to the sensors it runs cooler than the old one too, so maybe that’ll also help with stability.

Unfortunately, my noise problems still aren’t fully resolved. It turns out that the vast majority of the noise is from the hard drives, and replacing them is a bit iffier. Partly because a) I don’t really need more space right now, b) there’s nothing else really wrong with the drives and if I want to reduce noise then I can’t even reuse them in another system, so they’re wasted if I replace them, and c) I hate reinstalling stuff. One of the drives is only 12G, so I could probably take it out without much hassle, but it’s also the primary boot drive…

Ugh, it just had to be the hard drives that were the major noisemakers.

Asteroids In Your Pocket

While wandering about looking for information, I discovered that there’s a PocketPC port of MAME, the arcade game emulator. Woohoo! It’s a little on the old side, not having been updated in over a year now, but that’s okay; being the old fogey that I am, I’m mainly interested in the older games that are already included in that version anyway.

The PocketPC seems almost ideal for MAME — it’s portable, so that gives me a lot of games in a fairly small package for travelling. The PocketPC screen is taller than it is wide, just like most arcade screens, for efficient space usage. It already has a directional pad and buttons built-in, so you don’t need a joystick (can’t attach one anyway) or clumsy on-screen emulation. And it should be powerful enough to run all those older games that I want.

Of course, nothing is ever perfect…

Problem #1: Space. The emulator itself takes up about 7 megs, plus the roms (another 11 megs for the ones I want). That’s a lot when you only have 36 megs of memory to begin with, which then has to be split into ‘storage’ and ‘program’ memory and is already filled with various bits of junk. It should run from a flash card, but then a bit of juggling is necessary.

Problem #2: The controls. Although most games only need the joystick and one or two buttons, other features want to be assigned keys too. Coin insert, Player 1 start, Player 2 start, Quit, 3rd fire button, config screen toggle, etc., and there just aren’t enough buttons to define them all. You can at least get something workable if you dump all the ones you don’t really need on a single button though.

Problem #3: The controls, again. Although this PocketPC has the directional pad and buttons, they’re not all that well suited to gaming. There isn’t much feedback to the pad and it’s not well-aligned with each direction, so you can push downwards but it’ll register as left instead, or nothing at all. The pad is fine for normal usage where you can be more precise in how you push it, but it’s not so good in the heat of gaming. The buttons on the other hand have an acceptable feel to them, but they’re placed too close together and to the pad. With one thumb on the pad and one on the buttons, they’re often bumping each other.

Also, pushing on the pad and the buttons tends to make the whole PocketPC ‘wiggle’ a bit, since you’re only pushing on one end of it and there’s nothing bracing the other end. Annoying.

Problem #4: Sound. Although you can enable sound in a lot of the games, doing so slows it down considerably, and then it starts to sound awful and choppy anyway. You may as well just keep the sound off.

Problem #5: Speed. Even with the sound off, a lot of the games don’t seem to run at full speed. Even some fairly simple games like Elevator Action and Arkanoid, which were fine on my old 200MHz Pentium, are a bit slow on this 400MHz PocketPC. This isn’t exactly a high-end model though, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s something like slow memory at fault here.

Problem #6: Stability. After a few minutes of play it often freezes up or crashes, requiring a hard reset. I’m not sure if it’s MAME itself or the PocketPC to blame here, but regardless it’s rather pointless if I can’t play for more than that at a time.

Problem #7: Battery life. Although this device claims a battery life of eight hours, I can barely get three hours out of it while playing music on it, and that’s with the backlight turned off. It’ll be even worse when playing games full-tilt.

So close and yet so far. It’s one of those things that *seems* like it should work beautifully, but gets ruined in the details…