Ramblings by Chase

This time, it is scheduled. I will be shutting down Gollum for a couple of minutes tonight about 21:00 CST. It’s time to add some much needed RAM to the machine. I’ve been holding off because I like my uptime stats, but since I had to shut down Sunday due to the power outage I have nothing to lose. If all goes well, Gollum will be down only long enough for me to drop a new stick of RAM in and reboot. After that, we should be at 1GB of RAM instead of the current 512MB (which seems to stay pretty full these days).

UPDATE: Hardware installation complete as of 21:21 CST. Gollum now has 1GB of RAM and a new network card (which I almost forgot to install until I saw it stored with the RAM). If anyone notices weird behavior, let me know.

This time it wasn’t my fault. I had a power outage here at the apartment that caused me to shut down Gollum. Of course the server was offline even before then because my router and cable modem aren’t on the UPS (sounds like something to fix this afternoon). The UPS held up suprisingly well, although I manually shut the machine down after about 30 minutes just because I wasn’t sure how much longer we were going to be without power (as it turned out, about another 30 minutes). Anyways, it was out of commission from about 15:10 - 16:30 CST.

I’m posting this from my Handsping Visor over my wireless network.

OK, so I didn’t plan to go this far, but the webserver was offline for about 15 minutes this evening (about 21:00 to 21:15 CST). I needed to re-route some (ok, all) my cables under the desk and, wouldn’t you know it, the power cords for the cable modem and router were some of the worst offenders. It apears that everything is just fine now, but if anyone notices funky behavior that can be attributed to the outage, let me know.

UPDATE: Before and after photos are in my photo gallery.

I’ve been half-heartedly looking for some way to read my external 40GB HD from inside Windows. The hitch is that it is formatted EXT3. Maybe now that I have a Windows machine that can format FAT32 I should, but in the interim I found a utility that lets me mount my EXT3 drive as a normal drive in Windows! You have to check out ext2fsd if you need a solution like I mentioned.

Yes, Gimli is what I’m calling my notebook. I’ve had the new machine since Thursday at about noon and I haven’t mentioned here my experiences with it or Windows installed by the OEM.

As for the machine itself, Gimli is making me happy. He has all the features I really wanted (minus some RAM, but I can remedy that myself for about $130 versus the $700 IBM wanted to upgrade me to the same amount) and none of the stuff that I didn’t really care about. I have a built in wireless NIC that can do LEAP, which we use at school, and a wired NIC that I can use when I don’t feel like using the wireless network or I don’t have one available. It only has a 30GB hard drive, but I really don’t need this thing for storage as I have an external 40GB drive and about 500GB in various machines in my apartment. The 15″ screen feel plenty large, even when it sits next to my 19″ LCD at work, which suprises me somewhat.

It currently has Windows XP Pro installed, as that’s how it came from IBM. Whoever says that Windows is a fast setup from the OEM lied. From power on to final reboot (yes, there were three of them involved) it took me close to an hour to get to the point where I could just play with it. I don’t want to think about how bad it would have been without a good Internet connection (Windows updates, which are now installed as part of the final setup process … optionally of course, but who would want to expose a Windows machine to any more risk than they have to?).

This thing will be nice to have at TJOC in a couple of weeks. We are trying to do a 100% wireless network this year. Aside from the E-Punch computer, I think we can do it too. Hmm, maybe a USB wireless NIC? Nah, that machine is too old for me to want to tinker with it at all, not to mention that it is NTOA’s, not mine … oh, then there’s the part where I would have to shell out more money to actually buy the adaptor.

I haven’t decided what the final disposition of Windows on this machine will be. I’m seriously thinking about leaving a small Windows partition on here just for games. That is assuming of course that I can get all my hardware supported under Linux, which looks very good by the way. I just started playing Starcraft again … thanks John … and having it installed on this machine (which it is right now) would make online gaming, well, possible. I don’t think Battle.net is supported under Wine, nor do I believe that it ever will be supported.

Well, I’m downloading Knoppix right now to test a few things out before I repartition (like Kismet ). I wanted to play with Gnoppix since I use Gnome normally, but it doesn’t appear they support using a USB key to store user data between reboots like Knoppix does right now. I still downloaded it and plan on burning it to CD to play with, but I doubt I will do anything serious with it.

Oh, as for MPAA’s attack on TV Bittorrent sites: YOU SUCK! I firmly believe that there is nothing illegal or unethical in downloading TV episodes that are 1) broadcast for free already and 2) I pay for through my cable subscription. I have the right to record the shows, I simply to not have the hardware or inclination to record it when I can get a great copy of the EXACT same show while I sleep.

Now I’m all worked up again. I’m out of here.

… and is sitting right next to me on my office desk. Just working on getting LEAP to work now. That will be nice.

It’s sitting in the apartment office for me right now. I’ll give you three guesses where I’m going during lunch.

Here are a few links that I ran across this morning that looked really good:

• Making Wrong Code Look Wrong
• Cleaner, more elegant, and harder to recognize
• A rant against flow control macros

So, the package seems to have cleared customs just fine, but then UPS added a few entries in the tracking detail:

• 4:45 AM: THE PACKAGE WAS LEFT IN A UPS FACILITY CAUSING THIS DELAY
• 2:39 AM: A PROCESSING ERROR AT DESTINATION CAUSED THIS DELAY;THE PACKAGE WAS MISSORTED AT THE HUB. IT HAS BEEN REROUTED TO THE CORRECT DESTINATION SITE

My poor little box seems to have no fun at all. At least it appears that it will move through the U.S. faster than I’d hoped. I guess there is an outside chance I could see it by the end of the week.