Here I am, at Brown Library in Washington. It was a rather nice ten minute bike ride down eight blocks or so I was a bit hot but not terrible, and the traffic was heavier than I would have thought but I didn't have any incidents or near runovers. Other than to pay my fine, which I've yet to do by the way, I'm not sure why I came to the library. One book I'd actually like to look for is "IceMan" which they probably don't have, but you never know.
Also, I somehow killed perl on the server, so my irssi client is screwed. No idea what the heck I'm going to do there. This is one more reason I hate linux. Too many dependencies makes it so damn confusing. What I might just do when I get home is start moving all the data I can on to DVDs, which I need to do anyways, and then just nuke it and toss ubuntu server on there. Too much to think about right now, but I'll probably end up doing it anyways because from what I've heard ubuntu server is more manageable than debian with server stuff installed. Not to mention great support. That's all for now, prolly will be several more libraryblagposts before I leave.
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Book Worry
A few days ago I ordered my English and World Civilizations books off ABE.com, and it has occurred to me that they might not actually come before the semester starts. Not sure what I'm going to do if that happens, that's sort of a terrible situation. In my experience though, books from abe usually come within a week, or a few days over. Which is all the time I have to spare.
Swt, Mthmtc on a Cntrs 650!
A while ago I busted out my Centris 650 and set it up on the desk where the Indigo20 was. I've mostly just been poking through the files I had on it, mostly lots of Text Adventure development stuff, but some others. One interesting thing I found was Mathematica 2.0. Now, if I remember right, I first found this a looooong time ago, on one of my many 40MB Syquest cartridges. It's an incredibly powerful program, even on a computer from the early 90s. Luckily I also have a nice big book, about fifteen hundred pages thick and twelve pounds or so full of Mathematica examples and whatnot. Unfortunately the book was written for Mathematica 5, not 2, so a lot of the fancier examples involving animations or audio manipulation don't really work. That said, there are a bunch of basic 3D and 2D graphing examples that do work, my favorite is:
Plot3D[Exp[-Sqrt[x^2 + y^2]],
{x, -2, 2}, {y, -2, 2}, Lighting -> False,
PlotPoints -> 50]
It creates a fairly high resolution graph of what I can only describe as a mountain. In any case, here's a somewhat low quality video of it graphing that object.
Plot3D[Exp[-Sqrt[x^2 + y^2]],
{x, -2, 2}, {y, -2, 2}, Lighting -> False,
PlotPoints -> 50]
It creates a fairly high resolution graph of what I can only describe as a mountain. In any case, here's a somewhat low quality video of it graphing that object.
iPod Touch Rickrolled me!
For the past few days I've been playing a lot with cydia on my iPod touch, especially downloading themes and playing with them. One of such themes, named "Surprise" had a description which claimed that it was going to show off winterboard's (the ipod touch's themeing application) magical powers or something, but just ended up rickrolling me.
The first time it happened it actually played the video, and I assume audio. The second time it was a still frame.
wow.
The first time it happened it actually played the video, and I assume audio. The second time it was a still frame.
wow.
More computers on that desk!
It would appear as though the theme for this week is "How many computers can we have set up and running, then swap out for more computers on that desk" or something like that. Previously I had the GX1, then the Sun Ultra5, then the SGI Indigo2, and now my Centris 650. Later I predict the Quadra 700 and maybe a sparcstation or two.
Would be the Centris 650 hanging out, with my Multiscan 15 attached. This thing is considerably better set up than I had thought; nice big 2GB seagate hard drive, decked out with 7.6.1 and a ton of apps, 112MB RAM, and a balzing 25MHz full 040. I also have a NuBus 10BaseT & AUI card in it, made by Asante if I remember correctly.
Unfortunately though, my Multiscan 15 seems to be dying again, it's doing the thing where it applies a strong pink tint over everything. This happened a while back, but went away, hopefully that happens again. Interestingly enough, this is the very same monitor we got with our Power Mac 6115CD back in 1994. I still have the manuals, install floppy, and box; though the box is filled with Christmas lights!
Would be the Centris 650 hanging out, with my Multiscan 15 attached. This thing is considerably better set up than I had thought; nice big 2GB seagate hard drive, decked out with 7.6.1 and a ton of apps, 112MB RAM, and a balzing 25MHz full 040. I also have a NuBus 10BaseT & AUI card in it, made by Asante if I remember correctly.
Unfortunately though, my Multiscan 15 seems to be dying again, it's doing the thing where it applies a strong pink tint over everything. This happened a while back, but went away, hopefully that happens again. Interestingly enough, this is the very same monitor we got with our Power Mac 6115CD back in 1994. I still have the manuals, install floppy, and box; though the box is filled with Christmas lights!
xbox finally on the net
A while back I got a modded xbox from a friend of mine, which is awesome. One of the apps from the mod, xbox media center, has loads of nice little abilities like playing music or videos off samba servers, or copying games over via FTP and so on. However, my xbox is nowhere near an ethernet cable when it's downstairs, and I have no TV or RCA input devices up in my room (yet!) So, what we've had to do is take either mine or dad's laptop into the living room, run a long enet cable, and do net sharing, which sort of sucks and is a pain to get working properly, esp. if you want other devices on the LAN to see it, or for it to see the internet.
But today, that all changed...
While cleaning, I came across my Linksys WGA11B. This thing is more or less an over glorified wifi-b to 10baseT ethernet bridge. I got it many years ago (read: wifi-b era) from a friend of mine who thought it was broken, but in reality had just lost the power supply. In attempt to "fix" it, he removed the case, which left me with a board and antenna, which was just enough. However, I never had a powersupply for it. Today however when cleaning when I found it, I had the thought to try it because I actually had a machine for it, the xbox. After a bit of digging I found a generic 12v AC adapter, and hooked it up. The lights lit right up and I had no idea what to do.
A short trip to the linksys support website later, I was downloading the setup application and reading manual PDFs. Basically, you plug this thing directly to you computer via ethernet, you run the application, you enter in your settings, and hit save. As long as you don't press the reset button, you're fine. The main disadvantage to this is that I had to move the wifi-net to WEP from WPA2, so that's been a little bumpy. Other than that it works great and I can now access the xbox whenever, without having to do weird computer crap.
But today, that all changed...
While cleaning, I came across my Linksys WGA11B. This thing is more or less an over glorified wifi-b to 10baseT ethernet bridge. I got it many years ago (read: wifi-b era) from a friend of mine who thought it was broken, but in reality had just lost the power supply. In attempt to "fix" it, he removed the case, which left me with a board and antenna, which was just enough. However, I never had a powersupply for it. Today however when cleaning when I found it, I had the thought to try it because I actually had a machine for it, the xbox. After a bit of digging I found a generic 12v AC adapter, and hooked it up. The lights lit right up and I had no idea what to do.
A short trip to the linksys support website later, I was downloading the setup application and reading manual PDFs. Basically, you plug this thing directly to you computer via ethernet, you run the application, you enter in your settings, and hit save. As long as you don't press the reset button, you're fine. The main disadvantage to this is that I had to move the wifi-net to WEP from WPA2, so that's been a little bumpy. Other than that it works great and I can now access the xbox whenever, without having to do weird computer crap.
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