Winders FLP

Last night I was bored sitting around, so I decided to give Linux Mint a go on the Athlon, using my spare 80GB sata drive. About five minutes after I got it installed and updated, I was like "Yeah, I still really don't like linux..." so I pondered alternatives. I remembered that I have a great CD for Windows XP FLP, which is basically what you get when you mix Windows 2000 and Windows XPpro speed wise, but in terms of actual usability it's just like incredibly fast Windows XP. I installed that (in about 20 minutes!) and then got my drivers up and going, and I've had no problems whatsoever. This will probably end up becoming my actual production OS on the Athlon. It runs things like itunes8 and picasa3 just like as they were in Win XP. The only "problem" I've had thus far is SP3 not wanting to install, but that doesn't make the biggest of differences to me, because I can get all the other updates.

Holy Cannoli!

So dang, haven't exactly blagged in a while. Guess there's a bit of stuff you readers out there are wondering about. The most recent post I made was about how I had purchased the parts. We'll, they've long since gotten here. One of the RAM sticks was bad so I had to send it back, I should get replacements tomorrow. Hopefully.

-a night passes-

Last night I never really finished writing that post, so I'll finish it up here. According to UPS, my RAM stick is not only coming today, but it's on the truck. When I get it the first thing I'll do is run memtest86+ for a few hours to make sure there are no problems. I don't wanna risk it.

Right now I'm at the community college library, waiting for 10. At 10 is when I go in to start my official interview for being a paid tutor here at the community college. A few days ago Dr. Davis (my awesome english teacher) came up to me and asked if I was interested in tutoring other students in ENG111 topics such as expository and creative writing, and some developmental english. It sounded good to me, plus I could really use a job, so I went to talk to the Student Support Services counselor yesterday and we talked about the job for a bit and I filled out an application and all. It sounds pretty awesome, basically just student to student peer help, which is something I already do with other people in my class, but with perks. One being $7.50/hr, after I do the tutor training, another being that I get unbridled access to a little mail slot and even my own office of sorts. I'll be tutoring up to three different students, maybe one or two more, but not more than two at a time, which is good for me cause I'm best at one on one.

I guess that's pretty much it. It's 9:30 now so I'm going to go ahead down there and see if she's around.

Bought parts

I just ordered the parts from tigerdirect. I opted out of the shuttle because, while it was a way cool box, it was sort of expensive for what I needed. Instead I got a kit with a mobo, 2GB RAM, and an AMD 5000+ proc for $170, as well as a geforce 8400gs that will hopefully blow the pants off the x300.

What to name the new system, though.... Hrmmm...

Stranded at the Library

I'm officially stranded at the library. It's 12:48 now, and I've been here since roughly 8:10. I was going to try and get a ride with someone after they got out of their class (which would be right about now) but unfortunately I wasn't able to ask them before they left for class and I have no idea where said class is so I can't exactly get up and go ask. That just means that I'll be here until somewhere between 3-5. And for some reason, who knows why, when I was packing my bag this morning I figured "Eh, I'm not going to need the thinkpad" unfortunately I don't know /why/ I didn't think I'd need the thinkpad, but here I am, thinkpadless, in the library on a really nice Dell Optiplex 755. I was using the touch for a while, browsing the webbernets, but it occurred to me that not only is that sort of uncomfortable, it kills the battery in case I want to listen to music some time later on.

Several things I'm noticing about these setups are- the LCDs are really nice (of course) dell 1907s. At least three people are on stations that have the LCD tilted (they're made to be able to tilt 90deg for portrait work) by about 4-5 degrees. I don't know if they're aware of that fact, but it looks like it would be incredibly uncomfortable. Or at least really hard to use. Also, I absolutely adore these keyboards. They're compact, very tactile, fancily stiled, and very sturdy feeling. I could easily get one of these (* Prepares to open ebay...) to work alongside the Model M, or I could get two and replace the keyboard on the optiplex and athlon. The mouse on the other hand is absolutely horrible. It's a weird hourglass shape, way way way too narrow, and the scrollwheel is too small. Now that I think about it I've actually never really been a fan of dell mice. The PS/2 trackball one I have has the widest steps imaginable. Think if you were writing something, and wanted to move the mouse to a specific area in the text to highlight a section for re-placement or deletion or whatever. When you panned over the text instead of nicely sliding along, the steps are literally an entire letter wide!

All of my classes are going along really nicely, my English 112 class with Dr Davis is really nice, it's pretty much the same as ENG111 except it's much more thorough, and I like that. Right now we're writing a paper that's pretty basic, it's just a simple analysis of ourselves for him so he can examine our current writing capacity. The topic is of course argument, and arguing weather or not the writer (me/other students) agree that "grades you get in hichschool are an accurate reflection of your strengths and weaknesses in college." An easy enough topic. The hard thing for me is that I was never technically in "real highschool," I left Terra Ceia after 8th grade for homeschooling, and in homeschooling I was never technically graded. I suppose I could conjure up (in a much less connivery sense of the word) what my grades more or less would have been, had I been graded. The problem with that is that other students in my ENG112 class that have been through real highschool know that part of the reason your HS grades don't reflect your college strengths/weaknesses is that often (so students have claimed) HS teachers make mistakes when inputting grades, and the environments of many highschools can effect the performance of a student. None of that would be relevant for me because I was homeschooled. However for 8th grade, which was spent at a real school, I would agree that yes (or no?) my "HS" grades don't reflect my strengths and weaknesses as a college student. Though if I was to write entirely on the subject of my highschool grades then I would say that yes the "grades" from that do reflect my strengths/weaknesses as a student in college because I'm working almost completely the same here at the comm co as I was/am in homeschooling type situations.

Above I mentioned getting one of these fantabulous dell keyboards for my optiplex, and that got me thinking about my other optiplex, as I have two. Last night Tyler and I got to the conversation of routers, and how modern "home use" routers are nothing more then Systems-on-a-Chip with five ethernet ports and a wireless network adapter slapped on there. Because of this, when subjected to higher loads, such as when businesses with 20-30 computers run all their network activity through one, they fail. What Tyler was telling me was that what he does, and suggests for his clients, is to use an operating system called Smoothwall, running on a computer with two or more NICs. It sounds fairly amazing, supporting very controlable proxying and QoS, and neat things like scanning the first few packets of, say, a file sent over AIM to check for anything ominous. Similar to Tomato it supports in depth bandwidth monitoring and control, which is really cool. I popped it in virtualbox and played around with it for a bit, but since I didn't really read the manual or anything beforehand I was mostly stranded, but the principal sounded pretty great.

How I plan to [eventually] use it is pretty simple. Take my spare GX1, with the PII 400Mhz processor, put 256MB of RAM in it, and a 10GB HDD. Plus another 10/100 NIC to work alongside the onboard 3com. My cable modem would go to one of those, and then either my cisco 10/100 switch or another switch would be connected to the other. I'd set the current router to work in WAP mode only (don't you just love router firmwares that are versatile!) and connect it to the switch, and taadaa you have a fancy router! The main thing I'm wondering about though is alternative switches for direct connection, because I'd only need one with five ports, so the 12 port cisco switch would be overkill. I'ld probably put a test version of it into effect one of these days when dad is in Raleigh for a while, because it will cause a few hours of downtime at the least.

I'm going to go ahead and wrap this up for now, I might start another post in here later on today, but I have a few other things on my mind that I'd like to peruse.

things!

Haven't blogged in a few days, I guess that sorta ruins my "Whee, let's blog every day!" idea. Regardless of what I haven't said on here, several things have happened that are worth mentioning. I helped Landon move into ECU a couple days ago, and he gave me his Optiplex GX1 and a nice Logitech 6.1 system. The Optiplex is rather nice, decked out with an incredibly fast SCSI card and a 15k 36GB eServer drive, as well as a 7.2k (if I remember right) 9GB IBM drive. The 6.1 system is also very nice. Right now I have it set up as a 2.1 system because I don't have good placement for the rear speakers.

I also got my Cisco books for this semester, which starts today at 6:30pm with my NET225-50 class. The books we had to get are a little weird, so I'm not sure what's going to happen with that, but I'm not really concerned.

My room is finally 90% clean too, including the closet. I now have an empty closet which I may organize things into, what fun! While cleaning it out I came across my old electric typewriter. I got it a few years ago but when trying to clean it I was unable to get the top hood back onto it, so I just closeted it. This time around however I just decided to yank out the hood and use it with an open top. Working with it like this is a lot of fun, you get to see all the action. Plus setting pages is much easier. I'm getting closer to moving the server downstairs, as I don't really need full gig-e on it and it's starting to take too much space.

An SE, cat, thinkpad, and dell server walk into a bar...

Oh, and a scanner.



This blogpost serves no real purpose, I just wanted to take a picture.

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.

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!

Woot! (and rambles)

I just came back upstairs, and the xubuntu install is finished!

[presses enter to reboot]

[waits]

You know, the main disadvantage to having 320MB RAM in an old system like this is waiting so long for it to be tested, I think last time I timed it it took about 40 seconds, and that was with 256MB.

[waits more]

Woot, GRUB :D

Woot again, Xubuntu booting/loading bar! I'm just now noticing this, but the HDD activity LED on the front of the GX1 doesn't appear the be blinking. Odd...

Yay, at the login prompt now! It's funny when your OS starts faster than your RAM tests. I remember when I ran BeOS on this (still do, actually) it took about a minute to boot to the usable desktop, and only the last eight seconds or so was actual BeOS.

[logs in to xubuntu]

Xubuntu 8.04 looks really nice, now that I'm on my home LAN and I have crap deleted off the athlon (I had like 30GB of dupes, lol) I might go for dual boot.

Ok, logged in w/ loaded desktop. Grrr. I can't get more than 800x600@32 on this. I know this video chip & vram can do 1024x768@32. Alas, XFCE4 at 800x600 looks pretty nice honestly. Time to check for updates! ... Woo, updates installing!

Okay while those install I'm going to ramble for a moment. First off I've decided that I need to start tagging my blog posts. Not to make them easier to find or categorize, but because all the cool kids are doing it these days. Weather or not I'm going to go back to all my previous posts and tag them is unclear, but certainly all my future posts will be tagged.

That was enough rambles for one paragraph, and my updates just finished downloading, so while they actually install I'm going to move the my music library off the thinkpad onto the Athlon, because I like having synced libraries. Augh, crap. The thinkpad did the thing again where when I RDP into it from the athlon, it turns off it's internal screen and won't turn it back on unless I force reboot it... *Grumble*

I am, however, becoming incredibly intrigued by the idea of putting Xubuntu on the athlon now though. The last time I tried was when I was in Richmond, and if I remember right the main reason I was turned off by it was because there is only mediocre support for my wifi card in linux. But here at home I'm connected to the straight up gig-e switch, so things are different. I still won't have amazingtastic video drivers or whatever, but all my games are in windows anyways so who cares.

Blarg these updates are taking forever. I think what I'm just going to do is finish this post now, and then slap xubuntu on the athlon. Yeah.

Later Gators.