The toman diaries

Sanity in a universe of ProCon[TM] People

fredag, mai 20, 2005

When you drive around the internet in your salon, be it Firefox, Opera, Safari, Konqueror or even IE, you cant help but come across some discusison sites. Many of these sites discuss issues worth discussing, like how to best fit a chain on a bycycle, or what the shortest route to heaven REALLY is. You cant help but getting struck by the enourmous ammount of content in many discussions out there..

Other times, when you least expect it, because you are looking for some information on what the new Firefox or Opera browser contains of features and bug fixes, you get struck by the sheer ammount of noise that is out there.

So why is this? Why are there so many discussions out there, regarding web-browsers for example, that (if you read them out loud..I wouldn't) sound like two drunk people after a bad party where one of them is high on cocaine? Why do people insist on throwing ill-informed opinion out on everybodys desktops? Why do people use several hours of their days searching through forums to find someone to throw their mouth at? Some people even seem to use several hours of their days not doing this, they just READ all this crap. WHY??

They want to be part of something, I can hear my consciousness telling me. They want to feel like they belong somewhere. Fine. But why all this anger? Why do you use so much of the time you are given on just.. anger... bullshit...?

Just so I could tell you to read this article about KHTML and Safari? I certainly hope that is the truth. If not, go on, torture the next person you disagree with.

KDE Splash screen for SuSE

tirsdag, mars 08, 2005

I made my first ever GPL art, a splash screen for KDE on SuSE

When your host crashes

søndag, februar 13, 2005

Powertech, the nice firm that hosts the free home.no.net domain, had a serious outage on friday. At first it seemed as if they were having a simple reboot, but as the hours went by I started getting suspicious. First of all, my website wasn't responding. Then their pop3 mail service wasn't responding. Then their FTP server "couldn't change directory to my home" (This ftp server is running on a different system I think, since it is always accessible.)

So something went really wrong, wonder what.. At least ehy have backup. I got all my mail over again to my pop3 yesterday, and it also seemed as though my website was up and running at about 18:00 CET.

I was wrong. - Looking at my log-file, they had actually restored my website from the 27 jan. I got the impression they were going to restore it from a day or so back, since they said that any modifications the last day would not make it. The 27th is quite a few days ago, and unlucky as I was, they had taken the backup while I was modifying some of my php scripts and had therefore gotten a few faulty scripts with them. I didn't see this yesterday since one of the scripts check if I'm me, and if so it doesn't run any of the counters. It was only when I saw my log I realized something was wrong since the I had modified the output format to be less verbose.

Luckily, I've gotten into the habit of running wget -m ftp://my.site.com to make a mirror (eg, backup) of the site every time I make important changes.

So take it from me: Make backups! ;-)

A new graphics card

torsdag, februar 10, 2005

I just got a new graphics card for my PC. I initially ordered an Asus card with an nvidia mx4000 gpu and 128MB ram. It worked, but only for a few minutes at a time. It simply forze up my screen, couldn't move the mouse or use the keyboard. So I returned it and got a new one in a week. Same behaviour with that. - Frustrating

After exchanging some e-mails with PS Data, they agreed to send me an AOpen card with an nvidia FX5200 GPU on it, same amount of memory. This new card actually cost 100NOK more than the old one, but they actually proposed to sending it to me for no extra charge! Nice one :)

As you can imagine, since I'm actually writing this, the new card works, and it doens't hang for anything. The old one worked when I turned off agp acceleration completely in Linux (passing the option "nvagp" "0" to the nvidia driver via xorg.conf).

The only thing I'm having trouble with now is running the 3DMark 2001 benchmarks on it. Sometimes 3DMark itself hangs, sometimes I get the imfamous "infinite loop" BSOD.

The results I've gotten so far without any hanging is 2194 3D Marks with 2xAA on

I wonder if it might be the limited cooling these card have, both have no fan at all, but the heatsink on the FX 5200 card is about twice the size of the MX4000.

PC case Cooling

søndag, februar 06, 2005

Like I said, I just got a new PC.. Not much to write about it, except its a lot better than my previous one :) If you want to know what parts it consist of, look here.

I've always been facinated by physics and technology, and cooling is a physical science.. Cooling a PC efficiently seems like a nice thing to do, and not too expensive either it turned out.

When I first started the PC and ran it for a while, I didn't really notice it was hot, and it probably wasn't either, compared to other untrimmed PC's. But since the case has a hole in the back meant for an 80mm fan and the CPU is almost exactly horisontally aligned with this hole, I started thinking about mounting an air duct to cool the CPU better. I decided not to use another fan, instead I let the cpu-fan do the job of sucking the air in. Now, what should I use for a duct?

A standard solution for ducting seems to be to use, exactly, flexible duct-pipes you would otherwise use in ventilator systems. Surely it works, but getting one with a diameter I neeed would prove to be difficult since the cpu fan is 60mm and the hole in the case was 80mm.

Standing in the kitchen flushing the remaining milk out of a cartoon (we recycle them), I got the idea of using just that, a milk-cartoon. It is about 75mmX75mm, ideally suited if I only use some tape, siccors and some construction skills.

Sorry I dont have a digital camera, so I'll do an ASCII draqing for you:

No I wont, just kidding.

But did it work? I'll let the numbers speak for themselves. This is after the temperature has stabilized after about 45 minutes of running folding@home.

As you can see, the result with the fan blowing the hot cpu air out of the case is far superior to any other solution.

TV in Suse 9.2

fredag, januar 21, 2005

...is easy. I just installed a modem in a guys new PC, but to do that I had to remove the TV-card it came with, all PCI slots were taken. I'm just off the phone with the guy, he cant get the modem working at his place either (and we couldn't here), but the point is: I got to borrow the TV-card (Asus [something] 7133 FM/TV) to see if it would work under Linux, or more specifically, on the old PC (The new PC's gfx-card wasn't really up to it, hanging all the time, so it is currently in the repair state.)

So.. Its easy. After installing the Yast TV module, I just ran yast tv, and it detected the card, installed firmware (at least it said it did) and allowed me to scan for stations. So I did, and it cought the names of all the channels who send their name too.

Only problem: the PC is too slow for the image to show(I get the first few frames and it hangs), so I get only sound in kdetv. Oddly Kdetv wanted to scan for stations itself, and I allowed it to, but it didn't catch the stations names. I have sound though :)

Update

Image DOES work, just not with kdetv in its default settings. Using xawtv worked brilliantly :) Still working in getting fulscreen to work properly though. It now only has 800x600 px resolution in my 1024x768 monitor, resulting in black borders.

A new PC underway

mandag, januar 03, 2005

In many of my posts here I've been complaining about Linux, slow FIrefox, slow this, slow that. Today a new PC is waiting for me at the post office.

It is a custom built one (of course), without floppy, cd-rom, keyboard screen or anything peripheral. I have all those already (typing on a keyboard now for instance).

Processor is AMD Sempron 2500+, memory is a value thing from Geil (2x256MB), 40GB harddrive from Samsung, mainboard from asus (a7v8x-x) and cabinet w/350W PSU from Qtec.

I'm like a kid - weee

Firefox 1.0 for SuSE

fredag, november 12, 2004

Firefox 1.0 is out, thought I should mention although it is generally way to slow for my 300Mhz machine.... And people say there's not much difference between major browsers when it comes to speed! BS! Both in loading pages and showing me the interface Opera is king. I need to use firefox on occation though, to doublecheck my websites. Opera is better in all these repects of course ;-)

And since it has such a decent rendering engine, I thought I'd link to the SuSE Firefox 1.0 rpm's. Just for the hell of it. Installing now, lets see if its any better than the previous monsters. (OK, so its GTK2 but who cares right?).

Filesearch ala Google

lørdag, oktober 16, 2004

Google has relesed a beta of their take on filesearching, called Google Desktop Search.

It works by indexing all files on your computer, that is, it scans all files and put them in an index, a database. This lets you find the files a lot faster than you otherwise would. It scans continously, so keeps the database up-to-date enough so that you can find what you browsed in Opera or IE just a minute ago.

This [indexing] isn't new of course, MS Windows 2k and XP already has it built in and its called the Indexing Service. You turn it on and off in the disk' properties and search the database from an awkward interface somewhere completely else. Unix also has a similar utility called locate which searches a database normally created every 24 hours. Other similar programs exist for windows as well, but their names slip me right now.

Google Desktop

Whats really different about Google's approach is its inclusion of your local database in normal websearch. It appears just like google news does, above your normal search results. Exactly how it does this I dont know yet, but it works equally well in IE as in Opera, so I'm guessing it is hijacking some networking component in windows itself. A little spooky if you ask me. This is also probably the reason why its incompatible with so many programs, including the Microsoft Firewall Client on the ISA Server, some anti-virus (nod32, Panda), and, notably, the webhancer dll, which also hijacks windows networking. (Some of these incompatabilities can be fixed though, but thats not the point...)

Another nice(?) thing about Google Desktop Search is that it finds Outlook (and Express) Mail, in addition to having categories for spreadsheets and word documents etc. All windows-centric in other words..

Now let me see if I get enough time on a windows computer to really like this app.

The Wall

søndag, juli 11, 2004

Israel says it doesn't respect the International Court of Justice. Israel says in it's statements that the court consists mainly of Europeans, and that these arn't actually known for being "pro-Israel". (eg, dont like occupation, but thats another matter is it?)

Sure enough, 5 of 15 judges are from european countries. (Two from the middle East, two from Africa, two from South America, one from Russia and two from the far East. One is from the USA) Obviosly, the vote on the legitimacy of the Israeli wall came out 14 to 1 in favour of it being ilegal. Guess who voted against it; who couldn't separate politics and humanitarian issues? Thats right, the USA judge Thomas Buergenthal. Interestingly, he was in a German concentration camp during world war 2 and came to the US from Slovakia.