Ah well, there had to be some karmic balance to the luck we had with the TiVo last week, and we got it in full force this week. I tried to ressurrect the Celeron 450, and it won't even POST, so Jacob and I traded cases. His K6 is now in the Celeron's old ATX case and my K6 is now in his old AT case and routing packets happily with 64 megs of RAM. It'd probably have 128 except that the memory in it before was bad and causing kernel panics. I wonder now if that is what caused all those problems with my SCSI card years and years ago.
Anyway, I was also debugging someone else's code that was crashing on my OS X box and getting crashes as soon as I entered a function. GDB wasn't helping me at all, and I finally found that it was because it was trying to allocate 640k on the stack. Jacob and Phil were quick to point out the problem, and it makes sense, but the idea never even occurred to me, since that's just not a problem on Linux. Is it that programming is just more convenient on Linux, or that it just makes us lazier?
You may have heard that it snowed here recently.
You heard correctly.
16 February 2003
I win.
All of you potential Xfrisk players out there: don't click on the window manager close button for ANY window in the game. It quits. This includes the stats and cards windows. Just don't do it.
Earlier today on cnn.com:
SNOWSTORM SLAMS NORTHEASTCan someone tell me exact which of those is the Northeast? Right now it's not even snowing north of Hartford. 15 February 2003
Officials declared states of emergency in Washington, D.C., West Virginia, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia as a heavy snow storm moved up the East Coast
Technology is really great when it works. The other day I managed to update my Mac OS without a hitch, transfer service from my old TiVo to my new Series2, and get it happily talking over the previously opened USB 1.1 ethernet adaptor I found in the very back of the shelf at Best Buy. Woo.
This means, of course, that I am cancelling the land line today.
Last night I went and saw Daredevil and at midnight The Big Lebowski. The former... not so good. I knew it was ominous when, in a 96 minute film they spend the first 30 excessively setting up the character. Dave put it well when he said it was like an old Nintendo game: first you have the easy villan, then the hard villan, and then the Boss. If not for the weak attempt at flashback, the plot would have been totally linear and boring.
... but I'm not complaining. I had fun at it, and Jennifer Garner is just so darn cute.
The Big Lebowski, on the other hand, is perhaps the most amazing piece of art ever applied to film. There is no word in the English language which describes its wonder. It is truly scrumtralescent. Jacob and I laughed at all the funny parts... the parts that are truly funny after watching it dozens of times. Everyone else laughed at the predictable parts. We are the true fans. Worship us.
WALTER Hell, you just tell him--well, you tell him, uh, we made the handoff, everything went, uh, you know according to-- DONNIE Oh yeah, how'd it go? WALTER Went alright. Dude's car got a little dinged up--
Anyway, here are a couple pictures. Neither of them came out all that well, but I like them just the same.
Shaver's entry for today reminds me of some of the terrifying evil we have to do to get at some RPMlib functions which disappeared from the symbol table but at which we can get by doing some pointer arithmetic in an exported vtable. The rest of that file ain't pretty either. And only 233 revisions to date.
9 February 2003Update: The name of the network is actually cockinferno, not cockmaster as I had previously misreported. Apologies.
Yesterday I took 105 photos. Here are some of the less sucky ones:
They call me Quick Draw Shaw
Eliot St. and the Charles Hotel
I like the clouds here
And an oldie...
Simon likes to help us print rebate coupons
TiVo has this offer going where original Series 1 TiVo owners can get their lifetime service switched over to a new 80 gig Series 2 TiVo for free, which is very, very tempting. They've got free shipping, how can I pass? And I have a credit card now, so it's like having free money!
I had sort of planned to go get some finish for my bookshelf but was lazy and watched the Bruins lose to Pittsburgh and ate a deli sandwich. Insulating my remaining windows failed miserably since the plastic sheets were far too small for my windows which are something like 4.5 ft. x 6 ft. But I did manage to repair my Airport base station and reaffirm my totally kick ass soldering skills. Jacob dutifully stood by with a fire extinguisher as I plugging it in, and just imagine my pride when i saw the cockmaster network show up in my airport list, along with pinchy's den. Woo!
I didn't take my camera out with me tonight, which naturally was a mistake, but at least Jacob caught this accident on "film".
[ Music | 1969 - Boards of Canada ]
3 February 2003Jacob and I went to the first games of the Beanpot Tournament tonight. We saw BU beat Harvard and BC beat up on Northeastern. Next Monday is the final and I'm looking forward to it.
It is very lonely being a goalie.
S-A-T scores! *clap* *clap* *clapclapclap*
Before the game Jacob and I went furniture shopping. I got a badly needed bookshelf, although now I'll need something else to put on the mantle.
I am loving these four day weeks. I had a bunch of vacation days backed up, so I've decided to spend them by taking Mondays off for a few weeks. I could definitely get used to this. I need to some how finagle a way to do this all year long. It's probably best for my long-term sanity.
2 February 2003I haven't really been updating this lately because it's been cold and i haven't really been doing anything. Jacob already regaled you with tales of crappy insulation products, frozen pipes, and huddling in a fetal position in front of the fire.
Speaking of which, it turns out that the fireplace in my room can't really handle a nice big fire. It probably just needs cleaning, but now everything in my room smells like wood smoke. I've washed all my clothes, so now I think it's just in the carpet. And the furniture. And the walls.
It was a tough week at work. Two rather nasty and difficult to track down bugs manifested themselves, and Jon and I spent the majority of the week tracking them down and fixing them instead of working on the next version of the RC GUI. I hope next week is a little better.
18 January 2003Shaver took my overexaggerated "tons and tons and tons" comment literally and feared that Chimera may take three times as much memory as Safari. So Mike did what he does best and made me look like a fool. I did an entirely unscientific test which showed that, for one window, Safari and Chimera take about the same amount of memory, and in some cases Safari takes more. Chimera also feels quite a bit faster when rendering a page because it's incremental rendering rules. Jacob was quick to point out, however, that Safari scrolls much faster than Chimera, and went back and forward much more quickly.
<whine>
Blah, so it's really cold right now. I've cranked the heat up in
the house to 72, but the heaters haven't come on once since I did
so and the temperature is hanging aroung 63 in here. Fortunately
though, there actually seems to be no wind blowing, so at least
the windows aren't leaking horribly. And I have no firewood.
</whine>
So last week was my first back after vacation. I'd never taken two weeks off before, so it was nice to go home and see my family and friends for Christmas and come back here and lounge around for a week. Two week vacations are nice because while you can just be an amorphous blob that first week, eating whatever holiday goodies are in sight, that second week is boring as hell and you need to get out and do something. For me, it was the other way around.
Shaver's been in town for a few days... he came down and watched his Maple Leafs get handily beat by the Bruins. Woo. And the B's traded John Grahame today, which makes me feel more at ease. It's too bad things didn't work out for him, but dear god, I could not handle his jumping while in net.
Whenever Mike's around, there's always two things: gluttony and video games. The former was fulfilled (and I mean "filled") by Shona's turkey last night and some mango fried rice today. And the latter by Halo. I still die an awful lot, but I am getting better at the finer aspects of the game, namely killing the other people. I even won a couple of games!
Tonight we saw Catch Me If You Can and it was a delightful romp. It had a very Spielbergian feel to it. I read the book about two years ago, and the movie seemed pretty true to it from what I remember. Of course, how much of that is true I'm not so sure.
It's cold outside.
A lot of noise has been made lately about Apple's new Safari web browser. Now that I am a member of the club I gave it a spin. It's a fine browser, although a few things bother me about it (not the least of which is that god damned brushed metal UI... at least you can hack it out. It's fast, but I really wish they'd turn the status bar on and move the MSN Explorer-like progress bar out of the address bar. I'm definitely in the tabbed-browser-or-something-like-it camp. The browser to me is so much about content delivery that I almost never need to cut-and-paste from one browser window into another and I rarely ever need to see more than one page at a time, although I do often have ten or more pages open, so I find tabs much easier to manage than separate windows. I think if I were ever to use Safari as a serious browser, it'd have to have something like that.
It has been interesting to see a huge backlash against Mozilla and Gecko after the release of Safari. What seems really amazing, though, is that a lot of these Mozilla guys aren't really defending Gecko. Yes, it's the most standards-compliant browser out there and can render some hideously laid out pages, but it takes forever to start up and users megs and megs and megs of memory.
Like Konqueror Safari is based on KHTML, and while everyone hailed its quickness before, its rendering was crap. These days, though, it probably renders more sites correctly than incorrectly, and they're working hard on it. I think we may find that KHTML is the layout engine of choice as a middle ground between performance and proper layout and rendering for future open source (and perhaps some commercial) browsers. The GNOME folks may need to be dragged kicking and screaming, however.
4 January 2003We've been getting hit with a nor'easter the last couple of days... (Can't say "northeaster", there's no time!) It rained pretty steadily all day until it turned into snow around 11 pm or so.
Tonight Nat had a dinner party:
If you work there will be cupcakes
We played mafia. I was mafia the first game with Taylor and Veanne and we kicked butt. We won without losing a single person. After that I was innocent and got killed a lot because I played every game differently and no one could get a good read on me. I guess I gave it away pretty badly the first game, but I still lived.
3 January 2003
GO BUCKS
A hell of a game. That's all I can say.
(fuck michigan)
Back in Boston. It's nice to sleep in my own bed, although it was freezing in here last night, and I kept waking up because I was cold. I have a sheet, a knit blanket, and a down comforter, but I just couldn't stay warm. I have a big bay window by my desk, and another big window next to my bed, and they leak heat like sieves. I can't just turn up the heat or else Jacob will complain about being too hot and it's hard to justify considering our electric bill was 50% higher last month than any previous month, including our high in August 2002. What I need to do is just go to the hardware store and get some plastic to cover the windows. But that sounds like an awful lot of work and I'm not even dressed yet.
Check out the cool moire patterns. I'm such a nerd.
Evidently the entire social structure of the house has fallen apart while I was gone, and Simon has definitely taken charge here.
Merry Christmas. Here's the semi-yearly update.
I am in Ohio right now, spending Christmas with my parents. Earlier today we had dinner with my grandparents.
I got a Olympus C-4000 Zoom digital camera as my big Christmas gift. I've never owned a camera before, but it seems like a lot of fun, so i'm looking forward to learning about it.
Clearly, I suck at it.