December 19, 2003

Groo and Smoo

I spent a pleasant evening yesterday reading comic books.

No, really.

Wandering around Kinokuniya the other day I discovered that they had in stock both Sergio Aragones' Groo the Wanderer and Mark Crilley's Akiko on the Planet Smoo. I have a fair collection of Groo, but I've been looking for Akiko for a while now. Disappointingly, they only have the novel of Akiko on the Planet Smoo and not the original comic, though they do have six* volumes of Akiko's further illustrated adventures. So far I've read volumes one through three, which comprise the tale of The Menace of Alia Rellapor. It's lovely stuff, and highly recommended for children of all ages.

On the Groo side of things, I picked up The Most Intelligent Man in the World and Groo and Rufferto. The latter is particularly remarkable for a highly detailed five-page index.

Kinokuniya used to be my local bookstore, so I was disappointed when they closed their store. I was rather happier when they opened their new store in the Galleries Victoria (across the road from the Queen Victora Building in Sydney). The old store wasn't small, but the new one is at least five times the size. Now they've been there for a while and have had a chance to fill all that space with books, and I have to say that they are probably now my second favourite bookstore. First, of course, is Galaxy, Sydney's Science Fiction bookstore, where I have been a faithful customer for twenty years.

Not only do Kinokuniya have lots of stuff I want (first rule for success in business: have something people want), but their prices are reasonable, and they gave me a discount (10% on Tuesday, 15% when I went back today), and they gave me some free gift vouchers, and coupons good for 20% off in January and February.

Now all of you go away for a little while, as I still have three volumes of Akiko* to read.

* And another one.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:09 PM | Comments (45) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

December 18, 2003

Slight Problem

I can't read my own blog at work. Not until Miss OpenBSD and Miss Linux scroll off the page, anyway.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:48 PM | Comments (52) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Your Message Is Important To Us

I got my email working properly at home. It was last seen alive on Sunday.

I am presently downloading just over 1100 new messages.

I will get back to you. Really. (Just as soon as the spam filter finishes with them. That should cut it down a bit.)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:04 AM | Comments (51) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

December 17, 2003

Oops

I need to buy a new pair of jeans. Like now.

Hmm. I guess it's not that obvious.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:41 PM | Comments (44) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Sucks And Blows

I installed my two new computers, Kei and Yuri, in Lian-Li 6070 cases, which feature quiet fans and sound insulating foam. I also used Antec super-quiet power supplies.

And then I installed 8 hard drives in Yuri.

Which proved to be something of a problem. I turns out that the reason quiet fans and quiet power supplies are quiet is that the fans are slow. And being slow, they don't move much air. And not moving much air means not cooling the system very well... And 8 hard drives produce a lot of heat.

So I got a nice fast high-volume fan, and I stuck it in Yuri at the back to blow all the hot air out. In fact, I had to duct-tape it to the existing fan, because there is only exhaust vent and the existing fan is attached with these annoying plastic rivets which are impossible to remove. It's far from ideal, but there's a lot more air blowing out the back now, which is a good thing.

But. All the air is coming from the newly-enhanced case fan, and none of it from the power supply fan. And the case above the power supply is starting to get a little warm. A lot warm, really.

After a few moments I realise that the new high speed fan is doing such a good job pulling air out of the case that it is reducing the air pressure to the point where the slow fans in the power supply can't cope. I should be glad that at least it's not sucking air in through the power supply (which would dump lovely pre-heated air directly on top of the CPU).

So I took the side panel off the case. It's running much cooler now, with both fans working together to blow the hot air out. But it's not exactly quiet any more, is it? I said, it's not exactly quiet any more, is it?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:13 PM | Comments (44) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Krispy Kritters

Someone from the recruitment agency we use at work just popped in to say hello - and drop off two big boxes of Krispy Kremes as a Christmas gift.

Mmmm. Burp.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:31 AM | Comments (44) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Clicky Clicky

My new mouse has seven buttons and a scrollwheel.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:42 AM | Comments (46) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

No. No No Not.

Over on Trey Givens I found this interesting test which tries to recommend a presidential candidate based on your opinions on various policies. I got this:

1. Your ideal theoretical candidate. (100%)
2. Libertarian Candidate (61%)
3. Dean, Gov. Howard, VT - Democrat (54%)
4. Gephardt, Rep. Dick, MO - Democrat (51%)
5. Socialist Candidate (44%)
6. Edwards, Senator John, NC - Democrat (43%)
7. Clark, Retired General Wesley K., AR - Democrat (42%)
8. Lieberman, Senator Joe, CT - Democrat (40%)
9. Sharpton, Reverend Al - Democrat (40%)
10. Bush, President George W. - Republican (40%)
11. Moseley-Braun, Former Senator Carol, IL - Democrat (40%)
12. Green Party Candidate (38%)
13. Kerry, Senator John, MA - Democrat (36%)
14. Kucinich, Rep. Dennis, OH - Democrat (32%)
15. Phillips, Howard - Constitution (21%)
16. LaRouche, Lyndon H. Jr. - Democrat (16%)
17. Hagelin, Dr. John - Natural Law (10%)

Then "Big" Dick Gephardt.

Then a fictional Socialist Candidate.

Then John Edwards, about whom the only thing I know is that he is probably less loathsome than fraudulent TV "psychic" John Edward.

Then Clark, Retired General Wesley K. "Krusher", the anti-war general.

Then Joe Lieberman, who at least appears to inhabit the same planet as the rest of us.

Then the Immensely Reverend Al Sharpton. The only thing he has in his favour is that he isn't Dennis "The Menace" Kucinich.

Then Bush, President George W. I don't care much for some of his domestic policies - the War on Drugs he inherited, but Faith-Based Initiatives is his own - but he is the only one of the lot I would trust to run America right now.**

Here's a little note the test designers attached to the info page:

What sort of score should my top candidate have? If your top candidate scores in the 90’s or the high 80’s then you’ll be very pleased with this candidates positions.
If your top candidate scores in the low 80’s or less, retake the selector, but this time try varying the priority settings below each issue area--set some “high” and some “low”. Optionally, you might try taking the selector again, but this time, do not answer those questions on issues for which you have little passion or interest.
If your top candidate did not get at least 50%, then all we can is that you have a unique combination of political views.

I wouldn't have thought my political views were unique... But maybe they are somewhat unusual in the context of mainstream America.

* He is, isn't he?
** Since I'm an Aussie and have no say in the matter, it is a good thing for me that he is running America right now.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:31 AM | Comments (46) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

December 16, 2003

Tough Decisions

OpenBSD or Linux?

Downloaded from here.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:54 PM | Comments (51) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

December 15, 2003

Well, Of Course

You are Kermit the Frog. You are reliable, responsible and caring. And you have a habit of waving your arms about maniacally.

FAVORITE EXPRESSIONS:
"Hi ho!" "Yaaay!" and "Sheesh!"
FAVORITE MOVIE:
"How Green Was My Mother"
LAST BOOK READ:
"Surfin' the Webfoot: A Frog's Guide to theInternet"
HOBBIES:
Sitting in the swamp playing banjo.
QUOTE:
"Hmm, my banjo is wet."

What Muppet are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

(Via Ghost of a flea. Again.)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:58 PM | Comments (42) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Good News

Kei, my new 2.6GHz Pentium 4 Windows box, is up and running.

As I thought, gigabit ethernet works just fine with a standard cross-over cable. Since I only have two computers that support gigabit (well, three, but don't tell anyone) this saves me the cost of buying a switch.

I can get about 16 megabytes per second over Samba, disk to disk. That's only about 16% of what gigabit ethernet can do, but is three times what I got from my old server and my old Windows box.

On the other hand, Windows XP's routing is screwy. I'm blogging from Linux until I get that worked out. Windows can find the router just fine, but won't actually send packets there to be routed. I might just set up Yuri as a router for Kei - since they're plugged directly together, that at least should work. (In fact, Kei seems to be using the 100M ethernet port as a back-channel for the Gbit port... But still, it's working.)

On the third hand, I installed the nVidia drivers on Yuri, and they don't seem to work terribly well. It may be that they just don't support the GeForce FX 5700 fully; I can try swapping it for my old GeForce 4 and see if that works better. The GeForce 4 is at least listed as supported.

Oh, and Saddam Hussein has been captured. Hit Instapundit for a boatload of links.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:41 AM | Comments (44) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

December 14, 2003

Just A Picture

I've got 50,000 of them.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:11 PM | Comments (45) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Argh Argh Argh Oh Whoo

I suddenly remembered what else was on the lost filesystem on Kodachi, my old Linux box: my collection of 50,000 photos. Gone! Gone! I've been using them for years for any web project that needed a small picture; I've used them to create avatars for my web forums; I had selected some of them for the overhaul of this blog before that project got eaten by the ever-hungry mice.

Gone! But wait... They originally came as part of Corel Gallery 1.3 million, a package long since forgotten, but I should still have the CDs. (Laughter from the gallery.) In fact, I managed to turn up twelve out of the original sixteen or seventeen disks, which is a pretty good effort considering that I haven't seen them for five years. The package was almost entirely crap... Except for the photos, which while low-resolution (384x256) were sharp and clear, with good composition and a wide variety of subjects. They occupied three of the sixteen (or seventeen) disks... and I found two of them.

Argh! Argh! I can't believe I didn't make a backup! One of the reasons I chew up so much disk space is that I'm paranoid; anything that is useful and cannot be easily replaced is copied and recopied. If it's something I created myself, a copy will sooner or later show up on every partition of every disk of every computer I own. Which is the only thing that will save you when two disks fail from a RAID-5 array. (Which is what appears to have happened.)

But not in this case. In fact, I came across a directory that seemed to have once held a copy of my photo library, but has since been cleaned out to save disk space.

Probably, if I trawl through eBay for long enough, if I search enough file-sharing applications, if I pester enough people, probably I can find a copy of my lost CD #7 of Corel Gallery 1.3 million. But if only I had made a quick copy of it; less than two gigabytes of data for those photos, which is less than three dollars at todays disk prices. Just drag and drop the directory onto one of my many servers; name it something obvious like Pix so that I immediately know what it —

Oh. Look! Look what I found! Now copy. Copy the copy. Burn to DVD!

Only the files of the paranoid survive.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:01 AM | Comments (47) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

December 13, 2003

Old Trouble

I'm waiting for files to finish copying from Ukyo and Lina over to Yuri, and for Yuri to download all the latest updates to Fedora, so right now I can't proceed with building Kei. I could do some useful work - there are some people waiting patiently for Mu.Nu blogs - but I thought I'd watch some anime first.

I decided on Mahoromatic, since the first DVD was kind of fun. So I went to pop it in the DVD player, and there was already a disk in there.

The disk was Big Trouble in Little China. Which means that I haven't watched any DVDs for six months.

A little catching up to do over Christmas, I think...

Update: First DVD in six months and I pick one I've already seen. Go me.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:12 PM | Comments (46) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

1 It doesn't get any better than meeting someone who also owns Big Trouble in Little China.

Posted by: Sarah at December 15, 2003 06:35 PM (MbvGN)

2 Holy Christ. I've gotten the impression from poking around on your blog that you're a chick (or a pretty femme dude), but you also seem to know what BSD and Linux are, and you seem to have a wealth of knowledge about pooters, AND you own Big Trouble In Little China. If you ARE a chick, we need more women like yourself here in sunny southern California. Women here are hot, but generally aren't very geeky. Or cool, for that matter. Or maybe I don't get out enough. Maybe I should shut the hell up. Anyhow. Nifty blog, it certainly proved entertaining.

Posted by: g at December 19, 2003 07:30 PM (q0vv6)

3 Thanks

Posted by: Pixy Misa at December 19, 2003 10:41 PM (jtW2s)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

There's Useless, And Then There's...

(Via Ghost of a flea)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:38 PM | Comments (42) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

I Think, Just Possibly

root@lina Triplet]# ls -l
total 163840
-r--r--r-- 36036 2586182132 2609512448 64177273943300316 Jul 24 1902 Triplet 12 Beat.wav
?--Sr--rwt 228 1072470923 228 2586312932 Jun 23 1970 Triplet 13 Beat.wav

Those files might be corrupt.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:29 PM | Comments (42) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

The Computer That Ate North Sydney

The cables! The terrible cables!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:15 PM | Comments (44) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Thought As Much

The /pixy filesystem on Kodachi, my old Linux box, appears to be completely and utterly toast. Those crappy IBM drives finally got me good.

I think I already had everything interesting copied off. I can no longer tell for sure, because after trying a quick reboot to see if that fixed the problem, the filesystem will no longer mount. Or even fsck.

Of course, this happens just before I get my new server set up and copy everything over to a new home. Of course.

Fortunately, the vast majority of the files on there were either (a) anime and other videos that I have backed up to DVD-R or (b) backups of my other computers, which have not suddenly and irrevocably died on me. As yet.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:25 PM | Comments (44) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Just Say Nah

The Windows XP install routine has been stuck for, oh, fifteen minutes now. Somehow I don't think this is working.

P.S. Look, you idiots, I don't have a floppy drive. Device drivers are supplied on CD-ROM these days. The only reason anyone uses floppy drives any more is to load your blasted device drivers. Would you at least try to join the 90s, even if you can't quite make it into the new century?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:54 PM | Comments (48) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Not So Bad

Yuri, my new Linux box, is now formatting its 716.8GB /pixy filesystem. (Yes, all my Linux boxes have a large /pixy filesystem. Why do you ask.)

The only thing I'm not 100% sure of is whether the new IDE controller is working in DMA mode. If it is, then this box will shortly be ready to go.

I've reserved 45GB for Windows XP so that I can dual-boot and play around a bit. I'll report in when that's done - or when I trip over some other horrible problem.

Pixy's Tip of the Day

When a mid-tower case specifies that it has 12 drive bays, this does not mean that it is physically possible to install 12 disk drives in the case. It means that you have 12 different bays in which to arrange your 7 or 8 - or if you really push it, 9 - drives.

Also, IDE cables still suck. If I'd known that I wasn't going to be using my 3Ware controller for this, I would have done things rather differently. SATA cables are a substantial improvement, but something like Firewire, which can be daisy-chained and supplies both data and power on a single lead, would be even better.

I took a couple of photos of Yuri before I closed the case up. It looks like Cthulhu is trying to escape from within - but has become entangled in fishing line. There are cables everywhere.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:42 AM | Comments (47) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Processing 0.02, elapsed 0.1307 seconds.
37 queries taking 0.125 seconds, 68 records returned.
Page size 44 kb.
Powered by Minx 0.8 beta.