An orange in an apple orchard
Wowsa, looks like the new bwn driver actually supports my laptops integrated broadcom wireless, ’tis good. At least I know if my faithful Atheros card dies, I won’t have to buy a replacement lol.
Of course, assuming it actually works if I try to connect it to my WAP, hehe.
Ok, maybe all the (more general purpose) modeling software I have ever used just royally sucks for such work, but that looks pretty darn impressive to me!
It’s a computer built using a Microwave as the case lol
Shortly after startup this afternoon, my desktop suddenly shutdown! After booting her, the panel sounded with a beep code that I’m unfamiliar with, and displayed a message about having overheated.
I’ve never monitored the system for more than GPU temps over the years, so I’m not familiar with the normal operating temp in this case. However, I’ve noticed the system has been more prone to unusually heavy impacts from loads it’s used to. After doing a bit of web searching to see what the wintacular options are, since I’m more familiar with BSDs stuff, I installed a program called SpeedFan. The operating temperature being displayed was an average 48/49C CPU and 61 Core, with the system sitting otherwise ‘at rest’.
After shutting down for a “Deep cleaning”, the systems running at my equivalent of idle, has been running about 54C CPU/58C Core. According to Intel, my processor shouldn’t be exceeding ~62.5C. The fans were impeccably clean, even though my last time at it was quite a while ago. Really the only bad thing, was the amount of grime near the frontal intake; but I’ve seen this system run with much worse build up there (plus a fan in need major clean up), so I know there’s little impact possible. Running any games, brings the systems up to low to mid 60s in the CPU and Core readings, respectively.
So either make closer inspections of the fans, or be ready to deal with something rotten in sink land. I’ve sent my brother a message asking if he’s any thermal grease laying around, just in case. I’m going to try putting the machine through its’ paces a bit for now. My next experiment will likely be to adjust the hookups and run her under an open case….
and I forgot just how nasty this machines case was to operate on o/.
The other day, whilst parsing webpages in my usual manor, I stumbled across a nifty service called dropbox. So far, it seems to offer all the perks of rolling ones own solution but with better OS integration, and a network server. I’m planning on putting it to the test for replacing my existing rsync based system.
What dropbox is capable of, is not far off from what one can do using rdiff-backup and your own server. Main difference I reckon is tone meshes well with SSH and the other relies upon SSL. The way dropbox claims to integrate with the OS however, would more than make up in time lost to configuration.
My main gripe of course, is that dropbox does not yet offer their desktop application for FreeBSD :-(. Which effectively limits how much I can use it until suitable builds become available for testing.
rdiff-backup can solve the problem just as well for me, since my home server is about as reliable as the rock of Gibraltar; the only problem being the software involved. The lowest common denominator among versions of rdiff-backup available for my platforms, are not compatible enough, 8=). Which is why my computers rely on a custom set of scripts built around rsync: rs-mgr rs-pull, rs-push, rs-touch, and rs-vars.
If dropbox became suitably available under FreeBSD, my life would be a heck of a lot easier, and vectra’s roll could be reduced to backups rather than storage central.
In my web travels, I’ve just come across an interesting web-focused application and service, called Teambox. So far it seems to offer, a rather interesting stack of tools. Assuming it could be suitably extended into the neccessary work flow, by adding things such as SCM integration, code reviews, and issue tracking, it would be darn freaking useful.
Little old me, is used to projects where the best things in life are e-mail, XMPP, and Git, hahahaa!
A week or so ago, after updating my machines to a newer GFire plugin, I had the problem with it breaking xfire support on my laptop. Making me have to roll back to 0.8.3 :-(. Today I’ve just sent a message to the `gfire team`, in the hopes they might have a clue to to solving the issues.
Really, since my laptop isn’t for gaming, I don’t care as long as I can sign in / chat. Being able to do file transfers (finally!) and have the right status message displayed however, are worth the upgrade. I just recently noticed that status messages weren’t being updated from my laptop lol.
I guess, on my laptop I’ll just have to change my nickname on xfire to match status, e.g. ‘Spidey01 = AFK’ or something like that. No wonder people keep messaging me when I’m marked AFK, or ignoring the big I’m not here signs. No matter how bad a mood I am, generally I won’t take it out on someone unless they’re at the root cause of it; but when I’m marked away or busy, it means don’t expect a reply within the next 5-15 minutes: unless I happen to notice the message and have time to answer it. Assuming I’m even seated in front of the computer!
Installed and patched it easily, I’ve got 1.0-1.60 uber patches saved for every language I could find. Only hitch was the DX setup flunked, but it wouldn’t matter much anyway (there is no real DirectX on Linux).
As far as I can tell, the client works properly, but I can’t actually use it. My desktop panels overlap the window, and being as RvS forcefully sets the resolution down to 640×480 whenever it hits the menus, thus creating about 1″ blocks where the mouse leaves the games focus. Luckly fixing that after a ‘quit’ in the console, is a simple xrandr invocation. Odds are, I could just setup a quick bare bones fvwm session. GR has similar issues but is actually playable, not surprising as it was a much more professional quality bit of handy work than Raven Shield.
The second test however, was using the Dedicated Server setup — which worked perfectly! How much the performance is impacted by WINE and how much by the heavy network utilisation I’ve got going, is beyond my calculation though, lol.
After so many years of dodging RHL and company, I finally opted to give Fedora fair chance. Since it’s a big disk set and I lack the spare DVD medium, I opted to d/l the net install and live cds. For the sake of wanting to try it, I also opted to download the x86_64 version, since the machines processor is an Intel 64.
Round one: a very nice setup using the netinstall disk, only to find out, as anticipated it was cram packed full of network drivers (as any sane distributor would do), even had the necessary crypto support! Just not a driver for my fairly common wireless card. Even more irksome, whether by virtue of bad design in GRUB, BIOS, or a foup up in Anaconda, on rebooting the system, I was greated with a load of gibberish in the terminal, where in pressing enter goes to the Intel Boot Agent for PXE based booting 8=). Odds are my knoppix disk can nuke the MBR back to a stock without trouble, or I could just reach for my FreeBSD disk and correct the MBR.
Round two: go scp myself the the live cd ISO, and burncd it. Only to find it increadably slow and not very agreeable. However the blasted thing was able to auto load the necessary crap for my wireless, connecting after I supplied the nearly 500bit code for the system. While I don’t care much for yielding the package selection (or screwing with the running image in slow mo), it shouldn’t be hard to adjust things post boot and tune Fedora to my tastes. That’s kind of one plus of the distribution, it’s more of a screw with it until you break something sort ;). However the installer wouldn’t function off the disk, so back to the drawing board….
Round three A: cart the entire freaking kit to my room, and hook it into the router with a spare Ethernet cable. No thanks, there are distros that ‘like’ my hardare.
Round three B: Download and burn five disks of Fedora 12…. and shout loudly if the driver isn’t included.
Of course, I could likely have show horned the driver from the live disk into working with the net install disk, pardoning kernel panics, if I hadn’t chucked the disk already >_>. That is also assuming that the installers demands could be appeased!
In the end I took round three B, finding that Fedora x86_64 and for sake of testing, Ubuntu x86_64 really do not like my hardware! So much for having suitable kit >_>. Rather than trouble myself further to fetch a set of Fedora i386, I dug out a two year old (8.04) Ubuntu 32-bit disk and installed that. Did a quick set of updates to bring her to the new 10.04 LTS.
After installing about 900 extra software packages… I think I’m done, lol.
With my laptops updates finished last night, I’m finally ready to go green on setting up Fedora 12 on my desktop. Although I could always wait ~two weeks, I’d rather see how the system tkes the upgrade to Fedora 13. I’m also interested, to see how SWAT 4 and Raven Shield play with it, both in the client and server role.
The main thing that concerns me, is doing the install of Fedora ver the network. Generally speaking, I have had much better hardware support from modern BSDs then I have Linux distributions. On the other hand however, Fedora tends to be more ‘cutting edge’ and bloated to kingdom come, where as most distributions that I favour, tend to be more focused on stability and share my view points on minimalism. So hopefully, Fedora will take well to it.
In waiting for Dixie to sort the compiling, I spent much of it reading up on more of the finer details of Common Lisp, including CLTL. While I knew that modern lisp was a rather huge beast, I am now convinced that it must dwarf C++, in which case you have to take the C++ standard (and occasionally Cs) into sequence, along with Boost and numerous issues of developmental expertise. Most of which, I reckon, are rather learned by living with classy C++ code, or having to put up with shitty code when you know there’s better.
Now where did I store my CD-Rs… lololololol