Sun Mar 24 00:35:36 PST 2002

A fairly quiet, but fun weekend do far. On Friday evening we contintued the Dungons and Dragons (D&D) game we started last week and overall it’s going pretty well. We ended up in a fairly large battle most of the night before withdrawing all the way back to town. We lost our "guide", but he wasn’t much help really. Jason thinks that has an idea about what is going on. He thinks that the goblin village we nearly invaded is there to guard a tower we saw in the room that likely leads down to the "outcast" who he think guards the tree with the nifty apples and is also the Druid with a large frog who pissed off the villagers. It seems pretty plausable to me, but our ability to wage successful combat against so many adversaries is somewhat limited, which might make gaining access to the tower difficult.

Also saw Blade II Saturday afternoon. It’s an OK movie, but e directing and the writing left somethin to be desired. It falls sort of the original in a lot of ways, but wasn’t too bad. Basically, the story and the director were key elements of Blade, and without them the style and smoothness of the first movie are gone.

I need to make a decision about the couches soon. Phebe has people coming to clean the downstairs carpets, and they can also do the couches when they are here, but at $12 a linear foot, and 12-13 feet of couches, that’s around $150 to clean them and it’s unclear if they will last long enough to justify the cost of cleaning them. On the other hand they are over 15 years old and as far as I know have never been cleaned, so cleaning them might be a good thing to do on principle alone. Even if I get new couches fo rthe living room we would likely hand the old couches off to somebody, and it would be really nice if we cleaned them up a little first…

Sun Mar 24 22:57:02 PST 2002

Fun day. Church was a little odd since many people were off on a mission trip to Mexico. Speaker was from the church planting organization. Found out that "Our Place" is one of their plants, which explains why it hit the ground running and with such a good PR organization. Had lunch (well technically breakfast) with Caroline and Laurie after church which was nice and they invited me to a Oscars Award party later in the evening at Dana’s place. I dropped by home and the Jason, Phebe and I went down to Home Depot. I got the rotary saw that Mom got me for Christmas finally returned and picked up a rake to try and clean some of the dead junk in the lawn out with. Won’t happen untill much later this week since I need at least decent weather and Monday I’ll be busy moving furnature to for the Tuesday carpet cleaning and there’s Bible study on Tuesday evening, plus putting everything back together sometime Wednesday or so.

Anyway, the Oscars party at Dana’s was fun. Lots of people I didn’t know there, but it wasn’t a big deal. Didn’t really expect ‘A Beautiful Mind’ to do quite as well as it did, and while ‘Lord of the Rings’ didn’t do too bad in terms of number of Oscars, it missed some big ones, but it could be that they are waiting for all three to be released so they don’t jinx the other two and also don’t end up giving them Oscars multiple years in a row for different movies that are all done by the same group, and basically the same project, just released in three parts.

Wed Mar 20 07:13:16 PST 2002

Bible study went pretty well last night. I got a call from Pastor James late yesterday saying that he wasn’t going to make it because he had too much other stuff going on (he’s leading a mission trip to Mexico later this week) so I would have to lead the music without him for the next two weeks. Not a big deal, just not entirely expected. So last night we ditched the list of songs that I had prepared and just did requests, mostly ones that we hadn’t done before there, so I was a little rough, but not too bad.

Also yesterday we got a postcard in the mail from AT&T Broadband claiming that they were actually now ready to sell us "lightning fast" internet service after a year and a half of snubbing us. On one hand I’m tempted to just ignore it because they weren’t willing to work with us before, and their acceptable use policy had some issues with both hosting servers and VPN, both of which we do on a regular basis. But on the other hand the increased bandwidth for what is probably a substantially reduced price would be pretty nice. I’m considering if we could actually get both and effectively use two at once.

In theory it’s possible to use a pair of WAN lines, and just route traffic based on where it’s going. We could route incoming web and mail traffic to the IDSL, and run the VPN connections (.intel.com) over that and then let general surfing/game traffic run over the cablemodem. On the downside, it wouldn’t significantly improve our 2-person VPN solution any, which is one of our weak points, but it would improve performance when we had more than 2 people online or doing non-VPN activities.

Of course doing a dual-link network would involve somehow cramming yet another ethernet card in pooh, or putting both the outbound links on the same server port, but in theory that could work as long as both of them don’t confuse pooh too much about his own identity in terms of DNS and those other issues. Maybe I should look into those 4-port network cards again.

There’s one available from D-Link, a DFE-570TX, but there’s not a lot of information about using it with linux. One user claims that he can only get it to run in 100MBit mode if he uses the de4x5 driver explicitly. which might be an option, but some of my network devices that I’d want to hang off of it are 10MBit interfaces, like the printer and I think the 802.11b WAP is a well.

And I also found this rather disturbing conversation between Matthew Callaway and Jeremy Jackson on the linux-kernel list:

<> This is a reproducible oops, and my guess is that it’s related to <> the tulip driver included in the 2.2.18 source tree. We’re using <> a D-Link 4 port NIC, and it appears that it doesn’t work well with <> IPV6 interfaces. < <I have had problems with this NIC as well… Redhat’s installer/kudzu <tries to use de4x5 (sp?) module … bad news. But it works fine using <old_tulip module with only IPv4. Same with 2.2 series and 2.4 series <kernels. FYI

But maybe this message in early 2001 from Avi Green is cause for hope:

<I’m using 2.4 with DFE-570TX cards in a bunch of routers and other <machines and I’ve never had any problems with the cards. I use the tulip <driver in 2.4 in some machines (not routers) and in the routers I use an <optimized version <(ftp://robur.slu.se/pub/Linux/net-development/tulip-ss010111.tar.gz is the <latest stable version)

It might just work, although I’d like to try it out in a spare machine for a while before risking pooh’s stability.

Wed Mar 20 23:20:01 PST 2002

Fun stuff, the fans from www.pcmods.com showed up. 4 low-volume (and very low noise) panaflow 80mm fans. I put 2 in my P4P system which should help out the overall thermal performance without increasing the noise. Another went into the backside of Pooh to try and increase his airflow some since it had just the power supply fan and felt a little warm. I do have the case basically maxed out, so increasing the airflow seemed like a pretty good idea. The last one I used to replace the front fan in Ryan’s machine which made a huge difference in how loud that machine is. It was annoyingly loud, and now it’s acceptable.

Cat’s bugging me for dinner. Constantly trying to get my attention in the hopes that I’ll feed him. I don’t want to feed him until I actually go to bed or he’ll try and get me to feed him again when I do head for the sack.

Mon Mar 18 22:59:28 PST 2002

Been quite a while since the last update. Been pretty busy with work, but that’s no real excuse. Anyway, been spending some time practicing guitar and getting song lists ready for Tuesday night Bible studies. This week:

Ah, Lord God Shout To The North Behold The Lamb of God Sanctuary Create in me a clean heart Strength of my life

It’s also been nice having a laser printer to dump out hard copies of all the songs and words on a semi-weekly basis. Fortunately, we’ve gone through enough of the songs (most in a 2-hour practice last Wednesday that nearly killed my poor little fingers) that we can build a more stable list to use for a couple of months, instead of printing out new stuff each week.

In other unrelated news, I haven’t done much with setting up PVR stuff under either windows or Linux. Maybe that’s a good thing as I’m doing a bit less TV watching and spending more time practicing my guitar and other activities.

I’m also looking more seriously about getting some kind of new PDA/MP3 player and/or phone. Maybe it’s just toy-itis, but I’m starting to think that I do want an MP3 player, and a PDA with a keyboard (even a thumbboard) would be nice. The Sharp Zarus looks pretty nifty. I can see that as a viable solution if I can get an 802.11b wireless network card in it so I can access all the .mp3 files on the Linux server anywhere in the house. I may need to get a new phone in the near future (not too near I hope) since my nice Nokia 6160 has a weird issue where if it gets bumped wrong it turns off. Maybe a phone with better sync and organizer features will cover the bulk of my needs and then I can just get a cheep mp3 player…

Wed Jan 30 23:14:52 PST 2002

So after running to a review on O’Reilly’s latest bio book "Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics" that claimed that it also covered basic organic chem for the programmer types, I figured it was worth a shot. I’m intersted in looking at new problems, and ‘big strange data’ problems like the biology people have seems pretty interesting. So time to take a quick trip to Barnes and Noble to see if they have a copy to look at. Also to see if they have another book on managing open source projects that also sounded interesting to me.

So after poking around in the stacks under ‘programming’ and ‘biology’ and several areas, I give up and go ask where the book is located. Turns out that "Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics" is under "Web programming" and that "Managing Open Source Projects" is under "Linux". Not exactly what I expected in either case, but that’s starting to be the norm for looking for books at BandN these days. After looking both the books over the both seem to be decent, so a credit card swipe later I’m out a pretty big chunk of change, but with two more books to read. I’ve started in on the bioinformatics book and at least the writing is good and fairly clear. The author did stumble when writing about computability and implied that intractable was the same as NP-complete, and that both were doomed to never be solveable by computers, which is certainly not right. I’ve written programs to solve NP-complete problems, and for that matter, most cryptography relies on some form of asymetric algorithms, sometimes NP-complete ones. Anyway, best not to rant about fairly minor points.

Maybe I’ll read another chapter before I go to sleep. My cat is sleeping on my leg under the covers and moving him isn’t likely to be real easy…

Mon Jan 28 22:49:03 PST 2002

Lots of fun stuff today. Got to practice guitar with James for a couple of hours and I’ve got a number of new songs to add in now. My fingers are a bit sore, but it’s worth it. Also, lots of fun stuff came in the mail, although not entirely the stuff I anticipated.

First up was the Usagi Yojimbo book #6. I read through it fairly quickly and it’s pretty good. On a par with his other work. It’s got parts of several stories that are referenced in other books, like a bet-maker who tries to rig duels and get townsfolk to bet on the duel, and also Jei has a significant role. It also deals heavily with Usagi’s past and the town he grew up in, revealing a number of suprising bits, and filling in some details that didn’t quite make sense earlier in the series.

The second fun package was Lisa Loeb’s "Cake and Pie" CD (it’s an advance copy that I got via ebay and won’t be released until Feb 28th). It’s got some really fabulous songs on it like "The way it really is" and a couple of others that I like a lot, and some songs that I’m not too keen on just yet. But I think that if I listen to it another time or two some of them might grow on me, although one of them is a bit odd, and I’m not sure if I like it at all. But anyway, the studio version of "The way it really is" is just about worth the price of the CD anyway. It sounds to me like it had the most time and effort put into it, and it sounds great.

Tue Jan 22 22:50:44 PST 2002

I dropped by the computing support center and after a half hour of reboots and driver installs, it looked like the wireless card was happy. When I got home I fired up the laptop, stuck in the card and it worked perfectly. I’m really happy about that. Now I can work from home, anywhere in the house which is really a nice advantage.

I also picked up at 120GB WD hard drive to put in pooh for a ‘media drive’ for all the .mp3 and video files. I got a really huge one (I remember buying a 80MB drive for my 386) since it’s the last open IDE slot in the server so I figured I’d better go all out since adding more space beyond that would involve replacing a drive, which usually is undesirable. And about $40 per 20GB from 80 to 100 and from 100 to 120, I figured it wasn’t too bad of a deal anyway. I’ll drop it in the linux machine sometime later this week. There isn’t too much of a rush as I don’t have video recording set up just yet.

Instead of Bible study this evening the group takes one week a month off to help with a program called ‘Tuesday Treasures’. It’s basically a outreach program for people with mental issues. This week it was a consolidated group of around 150 treasures and helpers with a concert. I was told that normally it’s more of a children’s Sunday school format with a Bible story, a few songs and a craft of some kind.

It’s probably a good thing to start out this way with a little less interaction the first time. I think everyone avoids people and situations that remind them of their own fragility or mortality. It’s not that the people who are often avoided are contagious, it is that "healthy" people don’t want to think about being sick, or loosing capabilities that they take for granted or being dead. I’m fairly certain that is why many people avoid hospitals, nursing homes, funerals and other similar events and locations.

For me, it’s brain-stuff. I could handle loosing my hearing, or the use of a limb or two. Maybe even going blind. I could still envision myself living a happy productive life with a number of physical handicaps. It might be really frustrating, but it seems possible. But the one thing that I can’t really imagine is having some kind of mental handicap. Quite honestly, it kinda freaks me out a bit. And so that’s probably part of the reason that I’m not comfortable around these kind of people.

The other part is also that people who aren’t exactly playing by the same social rulebook aren’t predictable, and society is based a lot on people using the same social rulebook to interact so that people can predict reactions in other people and use that to prevent problems. I’ve always found it concerning whenever I notice someone that appears to be acting outside the social norms. What most people would call "behaving strangely" even when they don’t know the person, they are referring to the unwritten rules about what should be done in public, and how to react in basic social circumstances.

Anyway, I’m not trying to justify my initial discomfort, but rather to understand where it is coming from, so I can try and deal with it. This is really fairly important because they are people too. People who God loves and cares about, and so I need to care about them too, and I can’t do that if I’m preoccupied with thinking about the other stuff. So I need to at least deal with it mentally so that I can start working on figuring out how to show them that God loves them.

Sat Jan 19 16:39:04 PST 2002

Well, time for another shot at ATI video capture under Linux. I’ve already backed up /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc (very important, as this is the script that normally starts gnome, sawfish and all that good stuff) and I’m just about ready to try and install X, the ati.2 and DRM drivers… Needless to say, this should be interesting. I’ll also need to get Jason and Phebe to pause playing Diablo II for at least a little while to try out in case it crashes the machine again.

My copy of found magazine (http://www.foundmagazine.com/) arrived in the mail. I read the whole thing cover to cover and enjoyed it a lot. It’s really werid to see little bits of other peoples lives like that. The next one isn’t due out for another six months or so, but that’s the way zines generally go, not as regular as normal mags. TMCM is the same way, but they try and be somewhat regular. I think I actually like Found better than TMCM. It sometimes feels like TMCM is trying too hard to be ‘indie’ and does have some political leanings that seems a bit out there for me. Found just is what it is, and doesn’t try and overcommentary. We’ll see what Found can do with their second issue (assuming they manage to get it out) and what it is like.

Sat Jan 19 23:04:10 PST 2002

So, after compiling xc and installing it to alt-X11R6, I tried to get the ATI drivers working. Below are the commands that I figured I would need to get the whole thing working.

sync mv /usr/X11R6 /usr/X11R6-RH ln -s /usr/alt-X11R6 /usr/X11R6 rmmod radeon cd ~/GATOS/drm-kernel insmod ./radeon.o /sbin/modprobe videodev cd ../km make test sync # fbtv, v41-conf scantv startx xawtv

At least it didn’t crash the machine, but the drm-kernel mods or the ati.2 mods caused X to no no longer start, complaining about missing symbols or something similar. I basically have given up for now and pulled the ATI out of the linux machine and moved it back to the windows machine. I did put the Matrox G450 in the Linux box so that I could get better resolution and color over the built-in graphics and it’s performing well. I may even play around with dual-head sometime, but that’s for another day.

After replacing the ATI in the WinXP box, I had a nice time playing a little UT and watching a little TV. I like having at least the basic functionality back, even if it is the wrong box. I think what I need to do is to get another hard drive (which I was planning on doing anyway) and replace the system disk in the WinXP machine with the new drive running linux so I can really experiment with the ATI drivers and not worry about crashing or messing up the configation on the main linux server.

Speaking of pooh, I’m having some issues with the sound. I disabled the onboard sound to try and get the Equanox sound card working. I’m thinking this wasn’t such a bright idea. I had orignally thought that the sound issues in some of the MP3s were related to bad hardware, but the act of letting kudzu remove the configuration for the 815’s audio seems to have confused many other things, most critically the mixer. Also, the same audio artifacts, particularly in some of the .mp3’s seem to still be in the audio. Natasha’s Ghost seems to be the worst. It could be that the decoder has some problems, as they seem to play OK other places, but I really should double check on the WinXP system sometime, as I haven’t actually listened to that file on any other machine.

If that is the case, then pulling the PCI audio would be a good thing to do, as that would also free up a PCI slot, possibly enabling a PCI-based video capture card. It seems that the Hauppage cards are much more popular and may be better supported. If that actually worked, then I could get dual-head displays and PVR support which would be incredibly, incredibly cool.

But for now it’s time to concentrate on some more short term goals, like getting a basic home site up, practicing playing the guitar and getting song sheets set up for Bible study in two weeks.

Thu Jan 17 23:24:38 PST 2002

Well, practiced guitar with James for about two hour or so. Went fairly well and I got a few cleanup bits. Unfortunately, he didn’t bring a copy of his music, so I don’t have anything new to practice. But the good thing is that I’ll be able to reuse the code that I have for stashing the music and printing it up which is great. The only downside is that my fingertips on my left hand are a bit sore.

The biggest problem is that the ‘user interface’ to the scripts is pretty painful. The right answer may be to build a web interface. Strangely, that is likely to be the easiest thing to do. The scripts are all close to robust so driving them out of a webfront for organization seems like a pretty attractive option. But I probably should get the ATI video issues resolved first.

Wed Jan 16 23:33:23 PST 2002

Got the house cleaned up a bit and a few little things taken care of. Not a lot, but mostly it was just reducing the clutter and piles of stuff that had grown to pretty huge levels. Maybe we should have company over more often so we keep the house cleaner. Still haven’t worked on doing the big ‘replace X’ thing to get the ATI working. Jason and Phebe were playing Diablo2 a bunch this evening, and I don’t want to be experimenting too much with it while they are using it. Maybe I’ll get to it this weekend. I really need to figure out if I can get it working so that I can get my WinXP box up and running again sometime soon. But then again, I haven’t really missed it that much since all I use it for is gaming.

Tue Jan 15 23:55:43 PST 2002

I convienced Jason and Phebe to go to the homeowners association meeting so I could go to Bible study. I’m glad that they agreed. I had fun, and am growing more confident of James’ ablilties and theological standing. On one question, we both turned to the same passage to answer it, which was pretty cool. Good sized group this week also.

The HOA meeting went well according to Jason and Phebe. We are spending a big chunk of change to clean up and get the park built. I’m OK with it, it only works out to a couple of hundred per house, and I think it will be good for the community to have it.

I’ve got to get up a bit early tommorow to give Ryan a ride over to the Beaverton Ford dealership so he can take his car in for mantance and still get to work. And it’s pretty late already. Oh well…