Tag Archives: Linux

Framebuffer Fracked but System Up and Running

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Live in the inside of a particle accelerator is quite fast. You hardly get time to look around, but still things happen. So you are never too bored. Buts its no fun… especially if you are about to have a head-on collision with your opposite-spin counterpart at 0.99999C. Enough about high energy physics research, more about me.

Recently, I have concentrated almost exclusively for next week, and especially with building my Gentoo system. The Synaptics touchpad on my laptop gave a lot of trouble, and even worse was the framebuffer. Everything is now working, except for the blasted framebuffer. Naturally, it took nearly ten recompiles of different kernels to get it right. And a lot of searching. As of right now, I have a working X, with a minimal KDE install, Abiword, and Firefox. Its still a long ways away from the hard core developer production system I need. Fortunately most of the hard work is done.

Truth be told I have been slacking a bit. My room is still a mess, things are misplaced, and I have not touched my notes (let alone the assignments) yet. The resume still needs to be done, OSAP picked up, rides, scheduling, et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseum. Better get cracking. Night.

Traveling at 300km/s

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This morning seems to be a continuation of yesterday. The world seems like a blur and time runs like a maddened hare on steroids. So in fact yesterday we did not go on a trip due to inclement weather. Instead I busied myself with school preparations, registering myself for my tutorials, finding where to buy my books, and getting rides. Most of this is pretty much down pat except for one tutorial, one ride back home, and obtaining the books physically. I am bit surprised that the visual computing course has no textbook… strange. On top of that I had to clean up around the house, make a few meals and prepare everything for tomorrow’s trip.

On the tech side, I finally got my USB stick working under Linux again. Now all I need is my SD card, and my Palm to get detected. No work on justCheckers, or my writing of course. I did meet up with Dmitry for a short walk, but getting there was a hassle as pretty much of Kennedy Road was torn up for repaving. Dmitry seems to be settling into his new house, and new semester at Wilfred Laurier splendidly. I convinced Rudy to take that course in databases, because I have no clue how otherwise he will survive the web programming course next semester. He seems to be walking a fine line with his courses… Oh well, times up! I need to get busy, busy again. Bye! And see you on Sunday. 😉

Standing on the Edge Looking Out

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The cool wind tugged at his body as he stood at the edge of the cliff. Beyond the worn sand hills stretched in contorted shapes, casting strange shadows in the rising sun. He leaned gently on the smooth bubble canopy of his desert mlaren, and smiled.

Well today I am feeling a bit better the last few days. My sinuses still pound repulsively inside my face. But I hope that this the last part of this disease. With the hay-fever season in full swing its hard to tell which of the symptoms are the illness or my irritable body reacting to the ragweed pollen super-clouds drifting around. Sometimes I wish we could get one quick frost. Now. Then the rest of the autumn can be as warm as it wishes. But that would be too easy. Right?

Yesterday, I got up feeling much better. No pain, only one nostril stuffed up and in rather happy mood. I was up by 5:00 AM so I took the time to try to fix my wireless card. I am not sure I can fix it. In Linux doesn’t show up at all, under Windows it gets detected as PCMCIA MTD-0002 after I take it out. It quite disappointing. Not too mention my USB flash drive is not being detected in Linux. I will have to fix this up first. I searched the Internet to my hearts’ content and found nothing about the wireless card. I think its firmware is absent… but I can’t load it until it can be seen by the system. Endless, vicious circle… a challenge for Rudy when I get the chance to talk to him.

Anyhow, I worked on the justCheckers project in the morning. I went through all the documentation, and updated most of it. All that remains is to expand upon on the style guide which pretty much complete, and write up a code of behaviour for developers and community users. I am confident with that done, and CHARVA being removed from the dependencies I will be able to release version 0.1.1. Then I will have to do a fair bit of work on updating the code, fixing a bit of the website (yuck), and getting the GUI finally fixed up.

As usual my work didn’t last for very long as I found out that my parents had planned to go on a trip. A kayaking trip. I mean I have been sick for these past two weeks, and they want me to kayak?!? Where will I get the energy? My feeble protests were naturally ignored. So we went kayaking on the Masquash river in the Muskoka region. So after a bit of grumbling (especially from my father’s side), some hectic packing, whining (mine and a bit of mother’s) and a long drive we were there. While I usually don’t admit defeat, I must say I enjoyed it. Mind you I had a fair bit of rests during the kayaking trip. I love silent lakes, and northern Ontario forests. I could go into a long description, but that would spoil everything. Go there and see it for yourself!

So when we got back home, I naturally dropped into bed from exhaustion (I couldn’t sleep in the car, and I had to tow Mom in her kayak back to the car earlier on). That is why I am writing this now, the morning after. Oh well better put this up on the web… and see if I can get anything done before today’s planned trip. Argh!

Another Day of Wandering

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OK. These sinuses are bugging the hell out of me. Its going away, imperceptibly slowly. The work at home is also seems that it is not going away. Washing dishes, picking up things, and worst of all cleaning the tarps that Dad used on the roof. Blobs of black tar that leave green smudges and that can only be cleaned using paint thinner. Oh and did I mention it was ragweed season and that I am sick at the same time. 🙁

In the morning I managed to finally spiffy up my computer. Yup, updated and running a new 2.6.11 kernel. It boots with a splashscreen that I made myself. Yeah! Go me go! I wish that I had more time to work on my hobby projects. Maybe tomorrow.

Drifting in a Netherworld

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Fall. Well not officially but still… everyone can feel it. Summer’s warm embrace is loosening and slowly turning into the cool of autumn. And haven’t enjoyed it a bit… not much time off. And now the sickness. Apparently my latest illness which seemed to be fading, has struck my sinuses. Now I have had to deal with this quite painful secondary infection… So much for time off. To top it off my knee-jerk coughing spree kept me up till 4:00 AM yesterday night. The only thing enjoyable was a reading a VERY depressing Japanese (Yeah for English translation) animated novel. Well maybe not enjoyable but at least I least I felt better about my own situation after it.

Fortunately I have been feeling better with each passing day. Mostly thanks to intensive pill-popping. Of course, to make the experience more exciting, my condition always seems to worsen in the evening. Lovely. So I decided to get some work done. I have updated my Linux box recently, with a newer version of udev, a new kernel (which I soon found to be broken with a new implementation of the Alps touchpad driver…) and few other things. I cleaned out a few old things, like useless libraries, a few games including Quake 3 Demo (sorry it was just too bloody) and UT2004 Demo (love the fast action, but I don’t have time to play), and best of all Mozilla. That’s right! Now I have only Firefox and Thunderbird… without all the additional bloat. I also
threw out the Gentooized version of Eclipse, and got a newer copy for my own personal use off the Eclipse.org site. A few minutes later (and DSL reconnects), I had everything I needed. Sort of. My update kept on crashing with the configuration of wings (awesome 3D modelling program), but that bug report I sent in yesterday paid off. I am currently in the process of
reemerging a few kernel dependent programs, and my update.

I have given up on my old laptop. The not-so-hot release of FreeDOS now lives on it. What a change I might add… I really do prefer a Unix system… but at least I can play my old DOS games again. Weee… OLD SCHOOL!!!

As for back-to-school (university) preparations, I am debating on whether to take PEY or not… and whether to pursue a degree in bioinformatics (I suck at Bio and Chem labs and their reports :() or take that one icky statistics course and take the AI courses. I would really love to hack robots (especially space probes/drones/rovers) as a job^H^H^Hcareer.