f-logjust another web log


10 Sep 2003 22:06 -- 
no distributed network project statistics for the mo


Its excuse time, but believe me I have them coming out of my ears !!

First off I was on Holiday in Milan (did not do much but did see a Farrari rally with some 80 cars !)

But secondly and more importantly I have been having some problems with X hanging and I could not work out why.

First off I kept finding the machine locked up with the screen saver hung cover the X desktop but I could telnet in an kill X and it would happily restart.

First off I thought it was openGL or the NVidia drivers but even if I ran an number of the openGL hacks on the two windows (I used Atlantis with 200 sharks !!) it would NOT hang X.

When telneting in I found (via top) that XFree86 process was using 98% of the CPU, never much memory.

But if I ran anything on the root window then the problem reoccured with the system peeking at 20% CPU then shooting up to 90% etc

I tried various things but nothing seemed help, then I thought I would just confirm the same problem occurred in Gnome (I use KDE2.3 normally) and it has been stable all day running xscreensaver)

So after all that thinking it was NVidia then xscreensaver then X it turns out to be KDE, well I am a Gnome convert ;)

Back to normal;

Finished reading odd but very good book "Tokyo Doesn't love us anymore" which follows a memory dehancing drug salesman as he flogs his wares to people who wish to forget and slowly loses his own memories. At the point of sale they often tell him what they are trying to forget and he has to deal with a disconnected world as time and space start to have no meaning and memory becomes freedom. Very Very good book.

Broadband sign up is slowly picking up, but i will not see it any time soon :(


31 Aug 2003 22:08 -- 
no distributed network project statistics for the mo


I forgot to mention, the eye is 17in/43cm in diameter and the whole thing is 45in/114cm by 27in/69cm


31 Aug 2003 22:03 -- 
no distributed network project statistics for the mo


Long time no write, sorry about that but I think you will agree I have some sort excuse.

These two gifs show me painting my room.

The first is my sun beams that were created with a pencil, string and some masking tape and although they do not stand up to close scrutiny they are very effective.



The second show a more intricate eye pattern that us part inspired by my Ghost in the Shell posters.

This was sketched by hand and the painted, took a while and needed a few coats, I finished of the edges with a permanent marker ;)



While this activity was going on the computer and desk had to be moved and I rigged up some more switches so I CAN have the external bay fans (and some other system fans) just not on all the time.

It has not taken me long to read "Dr Tatians Sex Advise to all Creation", which is fun romp through the world of evolutionary biology. Looking at some of the bizarre sex habits of earths creations and why such behaviour may have evolved. 

The book is especially entertaining in how each subject is broach with the form of a "Dear Agony Aunt" letter from the creature under scrutiny.

Funny and informative to the end the book seemed a bit short as the last fifth was the notes, bibliography, acknowledgements and index.


19 Aug 2003 19:32 -- 
no distributed network project statistics for the mo


Nothing like a gap in the flog postings ;)

So, what's new? Well I have finished reading "Sun Tzu" aka "The Art of War", something I had been trying to get my hands on for years.

I never really looked properly, but when in a book shop I would scan the military/world history sections, but of course it does not live there.

"The Art of War" (along with "art of management" and "the art of deception"(which i have read)) were in the business section, hmmm, no wonder it took me so long to find it.

I am not sure what I expected from this title and it is difficult to explain. Basically it some really old Chinese text written a kind of proverb/poetry form about military dealings. Although the text talks explicitly about the military/generals/armies etc it is widely believed that the text can be taken to relate to day to day dealings, with the ultimate teaching being that not fighting is a greater victory than fighting.

It IS difficult to read, but in there lies it power to take you in and try and offer you something you need .....

In other news I had my credit card limit increased and that of course meant I need to SPEND !!

And I bought a GeForce FX5600 8x AGP card, which now gives me dual monitor desktop in X/KDE and a resolution of 2560x960 not bad eh?

And the Nvidia docs that come from their FTP site had detailed instructions to set the monitors up, in fact it took me less than a minute to copy the few lines and specify my resolution and I was working in TwinView !

Expect TwinView related reviews of Linux software coming soon (whether you like it or not!)


12 Aug 2003 21:23 -- 
no distributed network project statistics for the mo


I wanted to add some notes about the overall Animatrix experience. First off it is VERY different from what you might expect.

The first short film "Final flight of the Osiris" is a companion story to the new Matrix films and is rendered in stunning 3D, but many of the others are typical hand drawn anime, all have the Matrix theme but from different sides of the fence including a black and white detective story and the last one "Matriculated" that has some odd ideas and gfx but if you can get past that is very thought provoking.

i.e. what if to keep the machines in order we created the world of the Matrix to make them supplicants ?!

In other DVD news, I am finally watching Terry Gilliam's Brazil, which is an odd mix between Catch22 and 1984, with the humour and mode done brilliantly.

I had to fight with Mplayer,Ogle,VLC before I finally got a working DVD player in the form of Xine, which works AND has DVD menu support !!

As I type it is fast forwarding to the point where I stopped watching it yesterday, as there seems to be no GOTO option this taking a while :(

Drat! now I can not get it to play again at proper speed, I will have to run it for 35 mins and come back, now stupid !!

Wait the slider hidden in the middle lets me select on a pixel of movement equals 5-15 mins I can watch it at last....

Wow! great film, nothing more to say about it really other than YOU NEED THIS DVD !!


12 Aug 20030 8:19 -- 
no distributed network project statistics for the mo


I got sent and email from the nice place that is linking to my computer O quiz so I thought I would return the favour

http://www.internet-games-directory.com/Top_Games_Internet_Browser_Based_Trivia_Educational.html

It is getting steadily hotter :(

And I forgot to mention, I have finished reading "the sense of being started at" by Rupert Sheldrake. Myself and most people I have meet know what is meant by 'the sense of being started at'. It is simply that odd sense that you are being watched or when you stare at someone else(without them seeing you) that they act as if the are being watched.

The book did have some odd views about physic phenomenon#, but the whole it is well written with lots of statistics (with details how they were derived) and ideas/suggestions AGAINST paranormal. I found the history of research very interesting and I can not help feeling this book has opened my mind.

A couple of things I came away with, are that any 'physic' fields (transmissions,precognitive etc) (if they exist) are reasonably weak and are not additive, i.e. ten people can not boost the power by ten and also quite simply that we are not very sensitive to these fields.

So I have started to read the Sun Tzu (Art of War), which is surprisingly easy to get into and fits right in my pocket ;) 

I have just finished watching the first four episodes of the Animatrix, and I have go to say the are very good !!

Finished watching the Animatrix all were very good (well except one).

Almost 40 degrees, it was Britain's hottest day ever since records began.

The anim gif from yesterday is 128x128 because it is currently my animated background on my Samsung V200 mobile phone !!


10 Aug 2003 10:18 -- 
no distributed network project statistics for the mo


It is averaging 30 degrees C here and its only 10 O'Clock, i can not wait until the sun gets on the house.

Surprisingly the machine seems to be doing OK, system temp is not going much above 50 the CPU 44 and the hard drives not getting above 50.

This could be to do with fact that I spent ages tieing up all the lose cables with electrical tape, red, see GIF below.

And speaking of the GIF below I built my self a switch (with window) to turn the neons on and off, as the can be quite unwelcome sometimes and I think it is a waste to keep them on all the time I am not here.

Thanks to http://www.casemodgod.com for the PSU test rig mod guide, this is where I tested my switch and quickly realised I had cut the wrong wires (I cut the 12v(red) when the neons used the 5v(yellow)). They also gave me the idea of putting the switch in an unused 3 1/4 bay (I started to mount the switch in a external box that would have hung out the back.

Oh, and I love there tag line "Mod it till it bleeds", damn straight guys !!

It is to hot! air conditioning is quite rare and completely unheard of in homes, the fans are not cutting it !



And remember to count your Linux self http://counter.li.org/cgi-bin/runscript/display-person.cgi?user=323714 I put all my machines on, STAND UP AND BE COUNTED!


6 Aug 2003 22:03 -- 
no distributed network project statistics for the mo


I have been going through the setuid programs on the system (expect security page soon) and there were i62 programs, of which 43 were obviously not needed to be setuid (and 18 of those were games that i guess wanted access to write global hi-score tables)

Nine appear to be 100% genuinely needed and 10 I will be cautious removing and one I want to look up on the internet.

It was stupidly hot today, trains were delayed due to heat buckled tracks and it is not nice, even now the sun has gone down.

However the system appears to be maintaining its cool and I have removed the fans from the external bay and as it is free any way appears to be able to regulate its own heat quite well (works with hddtemp).

The large amount of white foam padding above the extra bright blue neon means the case glows even more than before and I will look into building a simple switch to turn the neons off (it seems a waste to leave them on 24 hours a day)

Oh, and I have fixed the dodgy link from the other day, missing double quote don't sh'know ?


6 Aug 20030 7:19 -- 
no distributed network project statistics for the mo


Well another step forward for silence but is it a step backwards for heat ?

The sound proofing kit took about two hours to fully install and I made sure I did as much as I could.

The kit came with three types of material, the first was a thick ugly colored foam (all had adhesive backing) which was designed for the top and bottom of the case and due to its size would have been difficult to put anywhere else.

This was quite difficult to cut either with scissors or a craft knife as each implement got equally gummed up, but the adhesive backing was easy to reveal and apply.

The second material was a much thinner, white, light foam designed to go around small areas in the PC, the was much easier to cut but much harder to remove the backing on the adhesive.

Last was the very heavy, black, leather looking material that I used the most of, this was designed to be thin enough to put on the sides of the case and I made extensive use, increasing the weight of my case substantially. This was easy to cut and easy to unpeel.

I had one and a half sheets left of the thick material due to not having much floor space and no top space, almost exactly one sheet of the white foam due to finding all sorts of places in the case to stick it and two thirds of a sheet left of the last material as it had the largest contiguous areas on the side to cover.

I will NOT be leaving the machine on until I can monitor the heat, especially as today is likely to be Britain's hottest day on record.


5 Aug 2003 22:42 -- 
no distributed network project statistics for the mo


History of the machine is up and here, needs another quick update (read it to see why)

I will put a link on the main page when I am ready, but now it is hot and I am going to bed.


4 Aug 2003 22:29 -- 
no distributed network project statistics for the mo


The logitech cheapo cam came with an interesting stand. Using a metal 'nub' on the bottom of the camera you can force the assembly to hold position by inserting the 'nub' in to the track in the rubber base.

Now as much fun as that sounds it can be quite limiting but, you can unscrew the 'nub' and  attach a standard camera tripod fixing ! much better.

I seem to keep forgetting to track the best way to link to http://www.fotolog.net/muhnamuhna and the machine history still needs some tweaks, but it might even be ready for tomorrow.

I noticed with the crash(/hung) that aRTs daemon was not running, funny but last time I had problems was when I was messing with aRTs settings, on the other hand maybe I should install KDE3 as I spent some time downloading the 300mb+ files !

Of course if I had broadband than I am sure http://www.debian.org would have sorted everything for me :(


4 Aug 2003 20:29 -- 
no distributed network project statistics for the mo


In other news I am trying to get QT installed as lots of things require it to build, but it is NOT straight forward, you have to be root, you have to do it in a certain directory you have to wait longer (a lot longer) than a kernel build !

The Logitech webcam works wonderfully, has some amazing lens, if i place it against by thumb with a maglite behind it i get a perfect in focus image of my nail ! (and the lens goes the other way to a focus of some miles !!

I have been planning my next war operation against the openGL setup, but it is scary, I know this is not windows and I can not kill the OS easily but still I hesitate. 

I reckon the best way to go will be to create some root scripts that will kill and rebuild the sym links as I please, I can then test build some of the openGL xscreensaver hacks and test which way is slow etc.

I am still not sure about ldconfig, especially after I looked in /etc/ld.so.conf and ran ldconfig -v ......


3 Aug 2003 15:46 -- 
no distributed network project statistics for the mo


So things did not go quite as planned but I think I worked out the kinks.

I also recovered the long time missing http://www.blender3d.org 2.28 release and it is very smooooooth and professional looking, had lots of fun with the deformation tool (not new but new to me!)

The history of the machine is complete data wise but I have not had the time to do all the color/layout stuff i wanted to do.

The VGA box I got for the Game Cube does not handle NTSC and guess what the Zelda wind waker extra games are ? NTSC ONLY bah!

I an giving though to linking to my daily pic at http://www.fotolog.net http://www.fotolog.net/muhnamuhna and look out for the group fotologs, I added one to the foot log !


1 Aug 2003 21:21 -- 
no distributed network project statistics for the mo


what where when? ......

this is coming at you from the main machine so I will not be to suprised if something goes wrong. I really only had to edit a few paths in files so it should just *work* here goes nothing....... Drat missed off part of the path, erm here we go again ......

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