OwlManAtt’s Blog

Noel, December 27, 2004

Woohoo kids, looks like I just got myself a damn nice digital camera. Fujifilm FinePix E510. She came with a 16mb xD memory card, so I bought a 128mb one for an extra $50 or so.

Let me tell you, this is a damn fine camera. It can even double as a camcorder. It can zoom, different modes, all that good stuff. I haven’t gotten to the booklet yet (which is strange, because I normally read documentation before I play with things), so I don’t know everything it can do, but man, it has *a lot* of buttons.

There is one major downside, however. This downside applies to pretty much every USB device I have.

USB devices and Linux *DO NOT* mix well.

Yep, that’s right. I had another battle with linux and the camera. Debian flat-out refuses to mount the goddamned thing, despite the fact that Trustix is loving it. I haven’t any idea what Debian’s beef is, but rest assured, I will lay down some asskicking later tonight when I’m a bit more relaxed. (Heh, I had to assemble another office chair for someone, and I was out shopping for hours, so I’m a bit tired.)

I’ve already taken a load of pictures though. I mount the camera on rambo, then scp the images to a temp folder on kato, rename them, organize them, and cut/paste into the public_html folder. You guys can feel free to check out my room, my cat, and a few other images right here.

Enjoy. More will come soon.

Ah, Christmas in the OwlManAtt household. A wonderful thing. New toys, clothing, books, and (closed-source, low-quality, EA) software. A good thing for everyone. Everyone who can’t run circles around an MCSE, that is.

Seven-thirty in the morning: The usual crowd assembles in the living room for the annual opening-of-gifts. I get myself a nice assortment of books (mainly linux books, win!), my pimpin’ penguin gear (which we shall all see soon, as I’m planning on buying a *DECENT* digital camera, win, win!), and an electric razor (Gee, I think someone is trying to tell me something…).

All in all, a good haul. No problems with it whatsoever. My sister, however, got the spawn of hell in her bag. The sims 2, from the slavedrivers at EA. I was asked some months ago if it would run on the computer. I reviewed the requirements and OK’d the purchase.

How I regret my answer now.

EA Games, being the greedy bastards that they are, have been trying out copy protection on their shit as of late. There are certain programs that the Sims 2 looks for before running, but after installation. Things like CloneCD. You know, things that can copy the disc. If it sees something like this, it flat out refuses to start the game, despite the fact that it installed without issue.

Copy protection schemes like this are utter bullshit, and are potentially illegal (See California’s recent activity in regards to shrinkwrapped EULAs for more information). If I wanted to copy the CD to give away, I sure as hell don’t need to install and play the game to do it. What EA did just inconvinices me.

Since no one gave a damn about CloneCD, I dyked it out. The game started without a problem. However, being one of them new-fangled Dx9 games, it can’t be happy without the user going through six kinds of hell.

Whenever you got into the game, it would randomly crash. Thankfully, I have had some experience with DX9 bullshit, and knew exactly how to remedy this problem.

Well, I knew /two/ fixes for this problem. One isn’t really acceptable in this case though: It’s flying to Redmond and putting a bullet through the head of the bright guy who came up with DirectX 9. So I pull up Nvidia’s site, and begin the download on their latest drivers.

Since the card in the windows box is a bit older (GeForce 2 MX 400, a classic, reliable, rock-solid card), the driver that came in the box with it is pretty out-of-date. As I learned in my EVE days, it doesn’t fully support T&L, which is something DirectX 9 is big on.

Download completed, I uninstall the old driver, reboot into safe mode, and start the installer. It refuses to see the nvidia card (Probably because it’s registered as ‘STANDARD VGA ADAPTOR’ beacuse we’re in safe mode), so I just feed the device manager the driver ini file. Reboot, fix the resolution, and we’re good!

My sister has been playing the game for awhile, no crashes reported. But I have this feeling that something else has broken.

Oh well. I’ll take it as it comes. I think my mom wants that box formatted and reinstalled, because the crap on there is getting a tad ridiculous. I’ll try swaying them to the forces of linux, shouldn’t be too hard…

The only things that would be missing is AIM’s voice chat, which my sister sometimes uses. The offical AIM client is the only client that does it right, and I do not know if there is a linux version avalible.

Oh, she would also be unable to play the sims. A dual-boot may be nessesary. I’m sure mum would be a lot happier with linux, anyway. Crashes less, but it has her mail client/browser avalible. Wouldn’t even need to convert the mail files to some other format: it’s all the same.

We’ve also got AbiWord, which does a bang-up job on working with MS word files. Only some of the more advanced Word features is poorly supported, and you generally only find CEOs using those when they’re doing internal memos and fiscal reports. Not something the casual home user even knows exists, nevermind uses.

Photoshop works well under WINE, I’m told. Actually, it might be possible to have AIM’s client working under WINE. Hm.

Still, a dual-boot on the family box might be good. People would mainly use linux, because it’s a hell of a lot more stable and reliable (Don’t you hate it when the entire computer freezes after you’ve been writing up an e-mail for the past hour?), but windows is still there for screwing with graphics (since my sister uses PSP a lot, but that may work under WINE), playing games, etc.

Hm. Not to mention I’d be able to ssh into that box and use spare CPU cycles/hd space. And that thing has like a 60gig drive along with the 20. =X

Oh, and we here at OwlManAtt.com wish everyone a merry Ranahanakwanzmas! Catch ya in the new year!

In a desperate attempt to distract myself from the chaotic going-ons of life, I took up the gargantuan task of deploying the OwlCam. As some of you may know, I haven’t had any success with the qc-usb kernel module since my FC1 days. The damned driver /never/ works under Debian, for some odd reason. Meh.

So I decided that rambo was going to be given a purpose. I broke the camera out, along with my box of distro install discs. After an hour or two of beating with the FC1 disc, I gave up on the easy route. I popped my Trustix disc in and watched the installer boot.

I shortly found out why more memory is a good thing, and why TSL isn’t a very popular distro.

The installer was shoddy, to say the least. I couldn’t manage to get my swap partition active on account of there being no harddrive in /dev, so I was stuck with something like 33mb of ram (less? more? I can’t remember what rambo has in it, and I can’t be arsed to check). If I tried anything more than the minimum amount of packages, the installer would run out of core and decombust in a rather ugly fasion.

First, half of the screen would turn red. Then ‘Signal 11 error caught’ messages (and a few of the dreaded ‘SEGFAULT’ messages) would pop on to the red, along with some other things about the system shutting down. After a few unmounts, it would spit the disc out, half way through an installer.

Not a pleasent thing.

So I did the minimum install and put the developer tools I would be needed on by hand (rpm -i /mnt/cdrom/trustix/rpms/blablabla.rpm). Deps suck, they really do. This reminded me why I use Debian.

After getting my developer tools set, I installed and configured my kernel source. Then I downloaded the code for zawtv (a video package for linux) and qc-usb (the module that supports my webcam) and began compiling shit. zawtv was rather simple, just a few libs needed to be installed from the cd.

Qc-usb, on the other hand…

Well, I didn’t have everything I needed in terms of kernel support. So I made the v4l modules and crap. I force it to load, despite a kernel version mismatch (minor problem, shouldn’t break anything, I think), then the qc-usb driver.

They both load. But the qc-usb driver doesn’t take ownership of the camera.

=/

Mornin’ folks. I’m just posting to tell you all about this nifty RPG called Kingdom of Loathing (KoL from now on). Wyatt told me about it last night. It’s sort of a spoof on other RPGs. At registration, you pick your class. There are thinks like Disco Bandit, Seal Clubber, Sauceror, etc.

You get 80 turns to do adventuring, and there are things to do that you don’t need adventure points for. You can combine items, sell things at the mall, join guilds, and a load of crap more.

What are you waiting for? Check it out!

And on to business. I’ve got yet another story from algebra class.

As I may have mentioned, one of the school administrators observed our class on Friday. The entire class knows that he doesn’t screw around, so almost everyone was (*gasp*) on time! Our teacher began the downfall of his teaching career by arranging the desks in a semi-circle so we could talk about percentages. (Yes. We were learning basics about percent. And people still didn’t understand it. Please, for the sake of all that is good, holy, and pure, get me the hell out of the public school system before it kills me!)

After not explaning it at all, he begans to ask people to play his little game. Someone asks the person sitting next to them a problem, they solve it, repeat. We went all the way around the room.

Then the phone rings, and the fun begins. Our teacher picks it up, listens for a few seconds, then hands it off to the administrator. The administrator takes it, mumbles, then pulls Meghan out of the class to talk about something-or-other to do with her schedule.

With the exit of the admin, the class reverts to the normal behavior. That is, doing whatever the hell they feel like doing with no regard to the teacher whatsoever. The admin returns with another teacher and Meghan, and the lot of them sit down in the back of the room and begin to have a conference.

Since the admin returned, the class is behaving properly (or at least civily) once again. Our teacher goes right on with his lesson, as if nothing happened.

Then something so incredibly and utterly wrong happens. Appearntly, us discussing percentages is disrupting Mister Bram and his companions. So he tells us to /be quiet/.

If I had my voice, I would have called him out on his bullshit. He has an office sweep that takes up quarter of the second (first? third? Not sure which sweep he has…) floor. But he has enough nerve to walk into my damn algebra class, begin to conduct a meeting, and then tell the people who are trying to learn to shut the hell up.

Had I been in proper health and possessed a better control of my voice, I would have stood up and yelled at him for being such an idiot. You want to hold a meeting? Get *the fuck* out of *my class* and go play around in you *massive* office. You’re taking up space that could be put to much better use (more classrooms, computer labs, etc) for your own purposes, but why in the hell actually *use* the space?

Mm. Moving on to the next order of business.

Not as if it’s any of your business what I do in my spare time, but I went and saw the Nutcracker done as a play on Saturday. And I enjoyed it. Then some other things happened, which I’m not going to go posting for a bunch of random strangers from the internet to read about. This is a notation for my personal reference. My website. I can do what I want.

And that’s all for today.

Greetings once again, my loyal readers! Not much to report on the amusing-life-story front as of late, but I do have an annoucement to make.

As of…uh…sometime soon, OwlManAtt.com will have some sort of Japany comic site up. Don’t read Japanese? Good, becuse even if you do, I wouldn’t care. The comics will be translated into English.

And no, this is not one of my projects. This is being done by Astro (of The Place fame) and her friends. I don’t have much to do with it, only hosting. And hyping. Traffic for them can translate into traffic for me. =)

Right. My next post will probably have something to do with the Nutcracker. Until then, followers, until then…