Computers

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Downloading FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE and hoping my internet connection doesn’t fuck up on me…. freaking phones !!!

I’d like to tell bellsouth where they can stick there equipment…

Currently running 334MB of 509MB (rounded) and going at 270~340KB/Sec and still going full steam a head downloading i386 Disc #1.

I’m shocked really, the main download server already popped past the max connection limit when I went to browse the files.

Seeing the situation I started looking to see which US mirror was the fastest, several seemed to be KiA when I started pinging to find the best response time. Oddly enough ftp13.us.FreeBSD.org had the best response and by a vast majority !!!

Oh baby is this gonna be a goooooooooood release xD. I started with FreeBSDs 6.0-RELEASE and look forward to seeing the things coming out of current hehe. There’s also a driver for 7.0 that I want to test out some time soon, I might have to wait awhile… I know my desktop did a kernel compile of 6.1-Release in like ~45 minutes but my laptop is not quite as powerful….

Haha, this reminds me of when my file server ran FreeBSD. Chugging away on that little 500Mhz Pentium III it used to take like 6 to 8 hours to recompile the entire operating system but always rock solid.

Even if I was sound asleep by the end <_<

FreeBSD 7 draws near!

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I think the word is euphoria hehe.

FreeBSD 7.0 is nearing it’s release with many many improvements, if I was in the business of having huge SMP servers doing lots of databases and network intensive stuff I’d probably have testing going on for months in advance..

Being a single spider, well I’ve yet to test it xD

So far FreeBSD 7 is looking like it is the best software update to hit my radar since Vim gained spell checking support in it’s own 7.x release 😉

Blessed number seven hehe !

I’ve already nearly blown out the walls and then my ears setting the radio ^_^ Celebration time ! Hooyah !

Creating Firefox searchplugins for any site – including Qt !

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You know, Firefox and friends have a nice search system but there are so many websites that just don’t have a canned search plugin you can install like the Wikipedia and Google ones. Because I use Qt and Python for most work on Neo Ports Manager I tend to RTFM a lot and one of the things I truly love about using KDE’s Konqueror webbrowser is I can go to the address bar and

qt3: someclass

and it will take me there, in fact I have it setup in Flock at the moment to use qt3, qt4 e.t.c as keywords to take me to the index. The thing is, I would like to search, after all there is a bloody search bar !

I tried looking online on how to make one but didn’t find any thing helpful, I think the stuff was written for Firefox 1.x so to heck with it. I opened profile and looked for where the search scripts were located. My laptop and desktop use Flock as the default web browser but the only difference this should make here is that my profile is stored in ~/.flock instead of ~/.mozila/*

The searchplugins are in your user profile, for me with flock it is:

/home/Terry/.flock/browser/t247gnll.default/searchplugin

On Windows the profile goes in your %UserProfile%Application Data in a folder such as mozillafirefoxprofile-name or flockbrowserprofilename depending on the browser you are using. Don’t have a Mac so dunno where it goes on there but thats why there is a FAQ online 😉

In here are several XML files,

Terry@dixie$ ls                                                            7:25
dictcc.xml         gmail.xml          qt3.xml            youtube.xml
dictionarycom.xml  photobucket.xml    weathercom.xml
Terry@dixie$                                                               7:26

Each one is a search plugin in the search bar in the top right of my browser, qt3.xml is a file of my own creation.

If you are like me, when you are surfing the fine web you occasionally look at the URL’s of the web pages you visit, since I spend alot of time looking around at the Qt documentation I know that the documentation for each class is stored as ClassName.html in a specific folder on trolltechs web servers. This means if you can find out how your favorite website stores it’s files you can create a search plugin for nearly any website on the world wide web !!!!

I opened the dictcc.xml file to see how it is done, so simple it is easy as pie. And unlike Operas easy way of doing it in the GUI, we can set an ICON to use in the search bar 🙂

Qt class docs are in http://doc.trolltech.com/major-version.minor-version/classname.html so we want the text we type in the search bar to be replace the classname part of the URL with out search text, we do that with a little string interpolation.



        Qt Toolkit
        Qt3 - Search all classes
        UTF-8
        data:image/x-icon;base64,
iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAABAAAAAQCAIAAACQkWg2AAABtUlEQVQokY2Rv0sbYRjHv+97d1zu
8gtzwauGGmgjXU+hpaVCMlUMDnZox4IS/AvcCg4Obv4HLZk6dNLFJJ3SQoYkpSTQVUMj8Vf10KaX
O+Jd7u2QkHha0O/4PJ8Pz/PwkE8/XuB+cWwGBv6eNIAri7nuLeG4Yde/WidNGwxqXNBS0uRjod+S
QxQAGa7EXOSz7Uquw9jIJwRP5+V0JkzpoDKakM+2y7sdUSJzS4HEjAiC/Vq3tGNUCyaAxdVwH6PD
TSq5jiiRzKaSfBOIJYSwwkVjfGZT8cn0+xfzcM/2CPVvFmN4uRRQ4wIA49LNruufty7OWr25137G
UC+aHuH0lw0goYlD+qzljKncwyfC9IwI4PTA8QiDE6/Rnuq1DI5W40Lj59VevTs+xetHTmSCo5Sc
HzrZdX161gdAneI9E7SURAhKO0bkAfd2bWxlQ1neUKIxXj/ulXc7hEBLyR5h4pHwbMHftdiH9/p5
yzEu3b8Xvf72AHwBGowMyNHjXBf5j3+qBfPG46QgNdvu87Q/nQl5hH6O9u1a0frdtAGMx3ktKYei
XGnbePUuyPHkP8KdoXcj3vwDRIGtlNEJQYAAAAAASUVORK5CYII=

I saw that icons were encoded in Base64 much like with E-Mail attachments by looking at the dictcc.xml file so I wanted to include an icon for my qt3.xml search plug.

So I went to trolltechs website, downloaded their logo, opened it in kolourpaint and resize/scale’ed it down to 16×16. I then searched for a base64 encoder/decoder that could handle more then plain text, because opening an image file in a text editor to copy/paste is a pain in the neck. I consider this fair-use of the logo, if Trolltech doesn’t they can write me a search plugin ^_^.

I copy and pasted the encoded form of the icon into the file as you can see above and volia we have a search plugin muhauahauha ! Then saved the file, restarted flock, wrote “QLineEdit” in the search bar without qoutes and clicked the ‘Qt Toolkit’ entry and flock opened a new tab with the QLineEdit class documentation for Qt3.3 ;-).

In a few minutes I will make a Qt4 one and change the ShortNames accordingly. With a little attention to detail this means a search plugin can be created by most any user for most any website. In fact with a little work I could probably set it up so I could search the [SAS] or PC-BSD forums this way, either through the search functions ability to look for topics posted or by thread #’s to go straight to a thread (which would not be fun to have to search by!).

I wonder if with a little poking around at the Open Search and XML specifications if I could have the searchTerms passed on to a perl script to do a a few tricks and pass it back in… I should look at that option some day hehe.

I love it when people make it so you can plug into an application without having to compile crap !

Windows will make you bald

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Today I had to set my Sister (in-law) with an e-mail account and access to it via my moms Desktop. So of course the obvious question is either she needs her own user account (in windows) plus the e-mail account or ma’s outlook would have to be setup to deal with the multi-login.

So I created the new user account for her, gave her an icon for outlook express next to the recycle bin and internet explorer (v6.x) on the desktop, set a wall paper and user pic (she loves Betty Boop).

Trying to find the docs on Bellsouth/AT&T’s website for creating a new e-mail account was not exactly as quick as I hoped but still easy as pie. I used my PC for that and RvS crashed in the process lol.

On Ma’s PC while logged in as the new user account for set up. I got a pop up from the windows security center just to tell me info I already knew. The Dell Support Center came up too, which we haven’t seen come up in many a year now ! Internet Explorer came up 404 on the pre-set home page (dellnet or some thing) and outlook express gave an error about the computer having no internet connection. Told it to go fsck itself and moved on and arranged for a pop-up less user log in.

Either AOL must have/had an in with Microsoft or a nice hackling plugin because outlook was set to launch AOL Instant Messenger on start up! And a general option for it too, like what the heck man. Now M$N or some thing from Microsoft I could understand but not AIM rofl. Although that PC’s got the good AOL client for AIM, the install is like 3 years old so it’s a version before AOL bloated the thing out. Which is really why I took to using all in one messengers like Kopete.

So I had to get that disabled, change the user picks, change the user names to match blah blah. Norton 360’s added toolbar in IE6 is not exactly welcome by my family — note to self, under no condition allow users to use IE as a default browser if I’m ever tasked with admining windows machines. And ban all Nortan and Mccfee products on machines with less then 768MB of Memory. In point of fact, make sure they pay extra for the psychiatrist bill for working with Windows.

So kicking about with Windows XP, Dell, Outlook Express, and AOL it was no problem to set up. But oh boy oh boy will you never find me using Windows for more then “Gaming” and similar reasons while Microsoft and other companies still are in power.

I’m a Unix man by nature and have a militaristic mind set. I value clear concise no shit assessments and not being nagged by pointless and flashy programs popping up taking several seconds to display only to tell me what I already know or worse try to sell me some thing 8=)

Windows, wouldn’t touch it with a 10 foot long cattle prod if I had a choice… Still it’s the only decent platform for playing *real* video games on. Experience has shown the consoles are, uhh I’ll zip my trap before some googler flames me <_< hehe.

This reminds me of why I do not want to buy Microsoft VISA, why my laptop and file server run Open Source unix based operating systems, and why I use few programs that are known to “annoy” me. I want to get work done, I know how to read the fine manual, and software that bitches at the user should be fed through a hex editor, operating systems included 🙂

FreeBSD, now that is a sensible design… it won’t nag you ever ten minutes or so.

With similar hardware specs between my laptop and ma’s desktop, the only other principal difference being I have a Sempron Mobile (AMD budget model laptop CPU) and hae has an early Pentium 4 (when 2Ghz was new and costly). My laptop running FreeBSD runs faster then her Desktop running Windows XP SP2 + NAV and now Norton 360 – even while running KDE on the laptop. Programs like Norton remind me why I’ve heard jokes about system admins automatically having a users quota reduced for trying to run heavy programs on time sharing systems hehe.

RIP nVidia GeForce 6200, PoS@256mb

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Well, to make a long story shorter..

Whent to join TG#1 to kill some stress but it was full, supper was soon so I switched to TG#3 instead and went to join Duke for a round.

Before the round started I had to getup and do some thing and ma moved my chair out so she could get to the printer so I had to wait. By the time I got to sit back down my computer had already had the monitor blip and the PC restart — from running SWAT4:TSS to showing the BIOS start screen… if there was any error message before that I didn’t get a chance to see it.

On each restart that followed the monitor was all funky and kept blipping on and off as if the signal wasn’t working.

Instantly my brains thinking monitor, monitor cable, graphics card, fans, and motherboard for possible problems. Hooked up the monitor I got from the Library for a few bucks, same effect. Opened the case, blew the crap out of it with a can of air. Yanked all of the PCI family cards out, Audigy 4, TV Tuner, GeForce 6200 e.t.c and gave them a go. Cut my finger trying to get the graphics card out of it’s PCI-Ex16 slot, freaking plastic lever was to buried to see which way it angled.

Unscrewed the main (looked 90mm) fan from the case but the power connector was to short to pull it clean for cleaning… Couldn’t get that unplugged so I pulled out the (E)IDE cable connecting the DVD-ROM’s and one of the 512MB RAM DIMMs and still couldn’t get the flib’n thing out.. So I ended up cleaning it with a paper towel half over the PSU, half over the mother board : Needless to say I didn’t even want to mess with the issue of getting to the CPU.

Managed to get that screwed back in and then I had to pull the main power off the motherboard to get the RAM slot back in (the slots are right under the worst tangle of power cabling!). The inside of the PC was dusty but not that bad, most of it was just on the fan blades and the front side vents (veeerrrryyyy bad) but still cleaner then Ma’s Dell and that things been running forever without a cleaning, like once in 7+ years.

Booted her back up and still no luck although the main fan was running a heck of a lot better the temp was still normalD. I noticed though that my motherboard had a port for a monitor on it with a cover. I remember there was a note taped on it when I first set up the computer < 2 years ago.
Interestingly while the monitor was displaying screwy when plugged intot he Geforce 6200, maybe even some kind of pixel array during the computers startup. It was perfectly fine when in the BIOS setup, maybe because it would have to be used at a really low level dunno. Set the BIOS Video configuration from AUTO to Integrated, restarted and changed ports.

Using the onboard 128MB Intel GMA it works… RVS works fine to but RvS will work with just about any thing made after the stone age if it supports the right features.. With how over-optimized RvS is you could probably run it on a Cuisinart without trouble : SWAT4:TSS on the other hand is quite sensitive to ATI/nVidia drivers and essentially resulted in an impossible to kill application.

All of the other computers here use AGP so Ic an’t even test the card or a different card in the slot, so I hope it’s the GeForce 6200 and not part of the Motherboard..

So it looks like I have to either give up on S4 or buy a new Gfx card.. I know I’ve often thought about upgrading if finances allowed but this does not make me happy. Data failure is cheap, use backups but when the hardware goes nuts what do you do?

Upgrade to GeForce 8400GS and it’s fixed… Guess it was the GeForce 6200 going bad :

AMD Knocking me off the chair

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The other day I bumped into an AMD K6 family processor and looked it up when I got home, when I read some thing about trasnlating to a RISC like instruction set I nearly fell off my chair… Today I looked up a little more. I would guess the K6 is probably up this ally as well.

RISC86 Microarchitecture

The Nx586 processor fully implements the industry standard x86 instruction set to be able to run the more than 50,000 applications now available. This implementation is accomplished through the use of NexGen’s patented RISC86 microarchitecture. The innovative RISC86 approach dynamically translates x86 instructions into RISC86 instructions. These RISC86 instructions were specifically designed with direct support for the x86 architecture while obeying RISC performance principles. They are thus simpler and easier to execute than the complex x86 instructions. Note that this approach is fundamentally different than RISC processors, which have no support whatsoever for the x86 instruction set architecture. The RISC86 microarchitecture also contains many state-of-the-art computer science techniques to achieve very high performance, including register renaming, data forwarding, speculative execution, and out-of-order execution.

The benefits of this approach are several. First, the performance advantages of RISC design are applied to the x86 instruction set. Second, the execution unit can be smaller and more compact. Third, the execution units can be more specialized to give specific performance enhancements. Finally, it will be easier to add additional execution units in future designs. The RISC86 microarchitecture not only gives the Nx586 processor high performance today, but also allows for significantly higher performance in the future.

AMD Website, Nx586

cpu-info.com, Nx586

KDE4 goes gold !

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http://www.kde.org/announcements/4.0/

This is awesome !!! I can’t wait to give it a go without LiveCD 🙂

The new Okular document viewer and Phonon multimedia framework are big interests for me. Oh baby is it gonna be a sweet road to KDE5 😉

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Holy glockomoly…. LaTeX makes XHTML look hard and that was a cake walk.

for the software,

pkg_add -r latex2e

Which of course fetches tex. Then I installed print/dvips via ports since there was no package on the mirror. Then I did a pkg_add -r of dvips2ascii because I’d like to setup my vimrc file for viewing files, since it already can handle pdf’s hehe.

So far the only bad thing that seems to come in mind about working directly in LaTeX is having to define label{} on elements that we want to ref{} later

latex handles the *.tex files written and makes the *.dvi, which dvips can turn into *.ps (PostScript), I think dvipdf requires dvips to work right not sure.

So essentially from LaTeX sources a lot of formats can be generated, while allowing a very easy writing experience in the comfort of ones favorite editing application.