Month: July 2008

Burned my 3rd coaster ever :

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Maybe I should just not be lazy and fire up my laptop so I can burn the disk with cdrecord. For one reason or another, burning CD-Rs with Nero Express 6 seems to get pissy if I don’t verify data properly. If this burn session fails, I’ll just have to open a new pack of CD-R and use my laptop.

I need to get a PC-BSD test machine set up for some work, so it helps to not have to have to wait on patches to install. My previous disk set was v1.5.0, the current PC-BSD release is v1.5.1 + auto updates. Since my test machine is also my regular desktop, she has dual monitors. I’ve spent some time reading through various X.Org manual pages and it looks like it should be fairly easy to get things set up the way I like it, pardoning any KDE issues I guess. Once I’ve got the monitors sorted out, I can get started hehe.

I can’t help but wonder though, how much fun it might be to take one PC, a couple monitors, graphics cards, mice, and keyboards. And experiment with concurrent users running X sessions. As far as I know, the only limitations involved are PC related. X seems to be fully capable of it, Unix like systems are more then capable of multiple users and the design of X follows suit. Why does all of this thinking make me wish I had more equipment to play with >_>

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Well, I made a posting on daemonforums about the smart phone / pda idea, personally I think I’m toast as far as finding something suitable, and they will probably think I’m an idiot lol.

But, I ain’t been able to find anything on my own so far and it’s basically this… Or continue to suffer :. One thing I dislike about my life, no one here understands the difference between a compiler and a weed wacker, let along how much annoyance they are. Is it to much to ask, to be able tow ork on stuff when I’m not at work? It’s really getting to the point where I may have to bring my own projects to work in order to get them done, without having to kill anyone in the process: speaking of course!

Why bother or just die trying?

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Fuck heads driving me fucking nuts….

It’s almost 0130 and I’ve still gotten nothing done !!!! Like, who the hell do I have to kill just to get some work done…. Damn blast and unfuck it all ! This is driving me out of my skull. I can barely write a post….

I had an interesting idea at work today, mobile device in the smart phone / PDA family. Ideally something between slightly bigger then a traditional cell phone and a little smaller then a Game Boy of yore, and with a QWERTY keyboard of course. Something that I could edit text files on and transfer data to and from a PC via USB or through a memory card.

The idea would be to use my “idle” time at work to work on writing code, there’s usually gaps of time where I can’t complete my remaining work until something else is done, so I’m stuck waiting (and usually pacing much to my mothers extreme annoyance and threat to crack my skull open, etc). So why not fiddle with a text editor instead?

As annoying as it would be to ‘thumb’ across a keypad, as painful as it would be to put up with no Vim, as expensive as the device would be…. I would probably be more productive then ever, like today. I had to wait about 20 minutes until I could finish, standing at ease, to avoid argument over pacing back and forth inpatiently — I hate having my time wasted.

So why not work on some code while I wait? At least at work, while I’m usually annoyed at least I’m not as *annoyed* as when I’m at home… Giving my family more chances to abuse my time. Maybe it is a crazy idea but at least, it is worth thinking about :. I do admit my friends are right, a phone for me is more of dead weight then a feature >_> Although people would actually be able to call me for a change, not that I like phone calls to start with lol.

“Why the hell did you call me when your sitting at the computer!” <<-- me. I hate phones with a passion but if it would fill the gap, I'd live with having a (more powerful) cell phone again. All I really care about is a decent text editor and a way to transfer files to/from the device with my FreeBSD laptop. Crap like mobile phone capability or internet access would just be a luxury. It would really be nice to be able to write programs for it without losing an arm or a leg financially just for a few custom apps (read creating a minimalist Vi editor or porting nvi) So far, I haven't be able to find anything suitable... but one can always dream of productivity, no? I haven't been able to find anything inside or outside of my price range that foots the bill yet though :-(. A few models of Zaurus PDA’s actually would be nice… but seem to be rather lacking in availability here lol.

Crud, if I had the right supplies I could build something my self… Probably electrocute myself in the process but hey, it would be interesting >_>. It would also be a way to pass the time. The thing that really pisses me off? I’ve had computers with less computing power then many of the smart phones in the American market, and they would fill my needs better if they weren’t so dang big.

Maybe I should just get some sleep… worry about it in the morning, I ain’t got a snow balls chance in hell of getting anything done tonight anyway. And to top it off, the dog has stolen the entire bed!!!

Writer’s Block: Phobias

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Do you have a remarkable phobia? Does your phobia have a large impact on your life?
Submitted By bitter_melodee

Live Journals Writer’s Block

Well, I do have a mild fear of heights: not strong enough imho to count as acrophobia but it is still there. My fear of heights usually has little effect on my life, I’m rarely more then a few meters off the deck. I’m very uncomfortable in high places and tend to avoid certain areas if at all possible. Such as houses where the upstairs is heavily separated from walking off the edge by railings instead of walls. The kind where it is wide open and if you wanted to go off the deep end, all you need to do is climb over the nearest edge and break a leg lol. I can’t stand being in such an area, makes me nuts.

Although oddly, the concept of flying does not bother me in the least! Maybe because it implies that one would actually have some control of the situation, rather then purely reliant on merciless gravity :.

I don’t really know why I have a fear of heights but I only have one guess. When I was little, my brother (10 years senior) would sometimes pick me up by the ankles and spin me around the room. Luckly I eventually got to big for him to get me off the ground so easy >_>. And I remember once when a friend of my mothers came to visit along with his wife and a few friends. I don’t remember what I said, maybe I told him to F off or something? I dunno but he picked me up by my feet and dangled me in the air until I apologized for whatever I had done to the poor guy lol.

I was generally a good kid and stayed out of trouble as a child, e.t.c. but some times I could be a brat if I tried lol. I was the peaceful couch potato in training, while my brother was the obsessive defiant hell raiser ^_^. Hmm, It’s kind of amazing how far back one can remember, my memory goes about as far as being 4 years old and encompasses most of the time between now and my very first memory.

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Just got out of Chesters Live Op, I’ve done the map before, as EL in fact lol but I wound up EL on this one anyway.

The Mogadishu mile map is a large but quite dark indoors. The first time I played the map, we had been deployed on a Live Operation that the scenario was to rescue a pair of captured Danish army sergeants. Chesters op was a search and destroy for X-Rays, intel, and weapon caches.

All went well until the second entry, Red team had a strong base of fire from where they covered us. So when Chester and I cleared out of the first building, we formed up on the second, leaving Red team to keep their angles covered. Chester tried the door and alerted a tango, so I ordered a breach.

We blew the dang door open and entered, the X-Ray must’ve fallen back when he heard the commotion. Because on entry, I saw him on my 12, checked my corner (3), and fell into the bastard hard… I figured, hey maybe we can take a prisioner and get intel for the next Live Operation.

X-Ray in the corner pocket (9) tagged me, the X-Ray, and Chester, then fled outside and mowed down Fury before Big12 could gun him down :

Leaving just Big12 to carry on alone until finally being shot in the kisser slicing the pie into a hornets nest :-(. All in all, things went well until that one X-Ray. But the actually went better in the first trip we did a year or two ago. When we did rescue op, we took %50 casualties within the first 5 minutes, one from an ambush and another through the house to house clearing. But in the end, on that Live OP it was me and Lazko, critical on ammo and blood red up’n’down the health gauges but still completed the op. This trip wasn’t so fortunate… but it was still a Live Op lol.

Can’t clear them all I guess.

Finally home for the night.

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Working morning to afternoon done, home for lunch done, working the evening done — even better, done early 🙂

Ahh with luck I might be able to get something to eat and start coding around 2400/0100, emphasis on “with luck”. I think I’ll try to start a little work done on NPMs settings module before chow time, dunno if anything will come of it though. I figure that I can work on the front end elements a bit right now and hopefully fill in the backend parts later tonight.

Hey, at least I’m still breathing !

rant…

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[project classified]
If I have to look at one more undocumented magic number tucked away… I think I am going to hunt down the original programmer(s) and force feed the code down their gullets one byte of code at a time….

I generally don’t pick on other peoples work but sometimes, it just royally pisses me the **** off. If I was the jackinape who wrote this shit, I think I’d burn it rather then run it. Is it to much to ask, that people leave code behind that will not antagonize the putz stuck maintaining it a few years later? Like, /actually/ appear like ya now wtf you were writing? lol.

I could have better spent my time working on my own projects….. And saved the headache of tracking stuff down.
[/project classified]

One thing I actually like about my work on Neo Ports Manager, other then that it is one of my projects which makes me the bastardo in charge of what gets committed. When I write something, I always assume someone will have to read it later… In NPMs case all code eventually hits a publically viewable subversion repository, with my name on the commits I might add! So it’s fairly obvious that I ain’t prone to submitting toxic waste.

Unlike a few people I’ve known…

Same laptop, much nicer box

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Well, I’ve quite enjoyed using the x11-wm/fvwm2-devel port on FreeBSD… But it looks like I’ve finally gone back to an old love…

(click to enlarge)

blackbox chix

Running FreeBSD 7-Stable, Blackbox 0.70.1 with a customized theme, fbpanels for a system tray and pager. GKrellM system monitor and the X-MultiMedia System (xmms) blasting music. I don’t care much for task managers or window lists, so switching between windows is done purely via sloppy focus (focus follows mouse) and alt+tab through bbkeys. The toolbar is disabled and I keep the slit empty, I have no need for them.

Since my laptop boots straight into GDM for the login manager, I’ve set a custom session in it that will execute my ~/init.sh by default. That kicks off all the fun stuff ^_^. The blackbox theme is a tweaked version of a “Corvette” theme for one of the blackbox for windows ports. I made a few changes and stripped out unnecessary crap (like the toolbar). Set my XMMS and GKrellM themes to something more matching. The wall paper was my first ‘experiment’ at making one, hence the lack of quality 😛 But I generally have my wall paper rotated to a different randomly through a python script and hsetroot.

I guess decking out my box is as close to relaxing as I’m gonna get :

Day dreams

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Hmm, an interesting idea but one that would take much more skills then I have and a few thousand bucks to even play with :

When stuck in traffic in front of a “road closed” sign, I was thinking about how we could possibly find out how far it goes without having to go around the other way and have a look see. The city does have a webpage for listing such things, but uhh it’s a bit of a joke — both in design and upkeep. The first thing that came to me was a satellite but that’s not really feasible.

Then it hit me, what about a UAV? It’s a very nifty thing to be able to send a UAV in advance to scout things out but this isn’t the US Army lol. Then I thought about something else… What about an radio controlled helicopter kit? If one could be modified with suitable sensors and communications link, you basically would have a poor mans UAV for short range aerial recon hehe.

Figure, if you could get an aerial on the kit that can establish an encrypted ad-hoc network connection to a laptop, it would be a way to send a video stream between the two devices. Heck, if one knew enough about electrical engineering, a cellular smart phone could probably do both internet and video, if a VPN could be sorted to connect to the phone or something.

Getting jiggy with a smart phone like that would also save having to figure out a main board that can run a conventional wireless adapter. *Sigh*, it is a really nutty idea any way you think of it but it would be a cool idea, even if it’s just a day dream :

Maybe I’m just a crazy spider lol.

EDIT:

Looks like a company actually makes stuff like this hehe.


RC Helo turned UAV

Ahh, sometimes I love having a laptop.

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I’m sitting here, just sorted the volume on realplay and posted an entry on LJ. When lo and behold, there is a flash of lighting, a stroke of thunder, and the power fails. Just long enough to cut the internet connection, reset every clock in the house, e.t.c. I’ve reset the clocks and pulled my laptop off the A/C, probably should shutdown in a few just in case I need the battery power later… Well, can’t say I’m not paranoid!

I know ya can’t win’em all but wouldn’t it be kind of cool to have a fighting chance? Or am I just managing to get intoxicated on bottled water, to even think of such an idea >_>. Coding until I pass the fuck out might not be much of a night but hey, it beats a lot of the alternatives right now. It’s not like I’m going to have any rest before work tomorrow anyway :