Commenter Juan Kerr on the aforementioned Bill Whittle piece lists his requirements for a Just War, including this gem:

War can only be waged with the right intention. Correcting a suffered wrong is considered a right intention, while material gain is not. Thus a war that would normally be just for all other reasons would be made unjust by a bad intention. Right intention requires that democratic statesmen accept the decision of their nations' courts and electorates on the legitimacy and the justice of their action.

Because even if we state that our intent is to rid a country of its oppressors, even if we actually do so at great cost to ourselves, even when the country elects a representative government while we defend the fledgling democracy from predators who would destroy or enslave it, all they have to do is deny that this was our true intent, and they can claim that the war was unjust, and that we, the liberators, are the true oppressors, and that the vilest and blackest of murderers are actually freedom fighters, even while the people they murder are their own countrymen.

Even though our actions match our intent, even though the outcome matches our intent, they choose to deny the entirety of our sacrifice and a people's liberation just so that they can also deny a success to their ideological opponents.

That's why Abu Ghraib resonates so strongly with the left. One incident of abuse (not torture, not to anyone with access to a dictionary), at one location, on one day, involving a small handful of under-supervised idiots. But it reflects their inverted worldview, when no other part of more than three years of effort in Afghanistan and Iraq does. To them, Abu Ghraib is true; everything else that has happened in the process of liberating those two countries is false. And the real murder and torture and rape that took place in Abu Ghraib prior to the liberation of Iraq simply does not register. It isn't part of the script. It's not that it's unimportant, it's that it's irrelevant, as if it happened in a story rather than the real world.

And they call themselves the reality-based community. Well, I have something to tell you: We aren't based on reality, we actually live there. You, with your reality-based giant puppet heads and your reality-based baby-eating soldiers, your sacred cows and your eternal paranoia, are based on reality just as a made-for-TV movie is based on a true story.

Which is to say, not at all.

The problem is, you have created these bubbles, and sealed yourselves away from the real world, from any sort of understanding or responsibility. And we can't reach you to help you. Not until something punctures your bubble, and that either requires an effort on your part, or an act in the real world so violent that we would sooner endure your continued estrangement. September 11 woke some people up, but who among us would not rather you had continued your slumber? And for those who did not wake, what would it take? For the Chomskys and the Moores, what appalling shock or tragedy would it take to make them finally acknowledge the real world?

Because argument won't work; we know that. Argument by logic and fact is a tool for debate among people who share a common reality; it serves no purpose for those who have repudiated the world in favour of a phantasm. In the end, Bill's posts, and mine, and Glenn's and Tim's and Ace's and Susie's and Jen's and Ted's and those of thousands of other bloggers are for us and for the people we share this world with, and not for you.

Because what it comes down to is that you are insane, and there's no point talking to you. And the cost of shock therapy is too high to bear. We'd feel pity, except that you chose your insanity, and that's inexcusable.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:50 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

So I got up this morning, went to the bathroom, then sat down in front of my computer and oops, Kei has rebooted overnight. Bit of a shame, since it's been very reliable since I swapped out the video card. In fact, the last time I thought it had crashed, it turned out to be the bloody Windows XP automatic update had decided to reboot the machine to apply some silly patch.

And hey, look what it was this time.

I had twenty applications running, you miserable piece of crap. Did I tell you to reboot? Did I?

Bah.

Unfortunately I still sort of need Windows around. Well, that or a Mac, and I right now I still hate Apple, so that's out.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:15 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

1 Why do you still need Windows?
Why do you hate Apple?

Posted by: Any A. Mouse at May 21, 2005 05:52 AM (kCb5q)

2 I use Photoshop and Fireworks, neither of which is available on Linux.
I do not like GIMP. It's powerful, but it's a pain to use.
Also, I play games.
I hate Apple because they waited until I bought my iPod and then cut the price by $300, and then told me that it wasn't their problem, even though I bought it from their online store. Great engineering and industrial design, abysmal customer service.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at May 21, 2005 09:19 AM (+S1Ft)

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Bill Whittle has a new post up. He's gotten a little irritated by the incessant carping of the left, and explains a few things to them.

Oh, and my SATA controller has arrived, so I'll be able to rebuild Yuri this weekend. The only problem is that it's a PCI card, of course, so it will be quite a bit slower than using the controller built into the motherboard, which sits on its own high-speed bus. On the other hand, it should actually work. There are few things more irritating than an intermittent, untraceable, and fatal fault in a $2000 machine. Well, actually there are many things more irritating than that, but Bill just dealt with most of them.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:07 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Hugh Hewitt had ABC News' Terry Moran (who I have never heard of) on his show, discussing the extraordinary exchanges between him and White House press secretary Scott McClellan, and McLellan and Elisabeth Bumiller of the New York Times.

This is what Moran had to say for himself:

It comes from, I think, a huge gulf of misunderstanding, for which I lay plenty of blame on the media itself. There is, Hugh, I agree with you, a deep anti-military bias in the media. One that begins from the premise that the military must be lying, and that American projection of power around the world must be wrong. I think that that is a hangover from Vietnam, and I think it's very dangerous. That's different from the media doing it's job of challenging the exercise of power without fear or favor.

We saw this during the Hutton Enquiry in Britain as well, with a senior BBC figure making the statement that the BBC's primary function was to oppose the government of the day. (I'd love to find the exact quote for that.)

Excuse me, but there is an actual, elected opposition to do that.

Your job is to present the facts. If you don't like that, you should have gone into real estate rather than journalism.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:54 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Let's see, 56 GB to go at hmm, 40 MB per second, which will drop down to 30 or so by the time it gets to the inner tracks, so call it 35 on average, that's 1600 seconds, a bit under half an hour, and this particular ϖ∂* run will be over.

It's done nearly 150 GB without errors, and normally it spluts within the first few minutes.

What's the difference?

I'm only testing one drive at a time.

I've run into this once before, and it's really, really nasty: With certain revisions of certain SATA controllers, everything works perfectly if you only have one such card in the machine. Things start to get a little flaky if you install a second identical card, but you can't track it down.

But, if you run ϖ∂ or some other stress test that runs both cards flat out at the same time, you get inundated with spurious errors.

I couldn't tell that this was happening because on this particular system, the spurious errors caused a "screaming interrupt" which effectively locked up the system. On the previous system, I could at least see that running two copies of ϖ∂ at once would report huge numbers of errors, which would stop immediately if one copy of ϖ∂ was terminated.

About 34 GB to go now. I think maybe the Promise SATA150-TX4.

28 GB to go. The thing I couldn't understand was that it looked like I had two bad drives and two bad controllers, which just didn't make any sense. Bad drives are a common enough phenomenon here at Pixy Central, but two out of four brand new drives and the controller card and the motherboard chipset? Seems a bit much even given the infamous Pixy Central Entropy Field.

22 GB to go. If I order now, I should get the card for the weekend, which would be nice.

This still leaves unexplained the spluttage of the IDE raidset. I guess I'll have to chalk that one up to gremlins.

14 GB to go. Order placed. Pity I didn't work this out at the time I was building the machine. Sigh.

Test completed, no errors. That's three done. Now, /dev/sda seems to be poigled right now from previous tests, so I'm going to reboot and run the test again.

Uh-oh, no rebootee. Have to wait until I get home tonight.

* Latterly known as badblocks.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:21 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

[root@naga ~]# iostat -k 60
Linux 2.6.9-5.0.3.EL (naga.mu.nu)       19/05/05


avg-cpu:  %user   %nice    %sys %iowait   %idle
           0.24    0.00   36.99   62.77    0.00

Device:            tps    kB_read/s    kB_wrtn/s    kB_read    kB_wrtn
hda               0.00         0.00         0.00          0          0
sda            1068.33     68366.46         1.04    3946112         60
sdb            1084.75     69425.36         0.00    4007232          0
sdc            1106.03     70785.86         0.07    4085760          4
sdd            1094.39     70028.55         0.90    4042048         52

Yep, 70 megabytes per second sustained from all four drives at the same time.

Woot!

Interestingly enough*, sda and sdb are firmware revision 1.01, and sdc and sdd are revision 1.03, and are getting slightly better performance.

* If you're a geek.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:11 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

I now recall that I actually worked out that point about the screaming interrupt possibly being fixed in more recent kernels some months ago, when the spluttage originally recommenced. (This was after rebuilding the system following the previous spluttage.)

However, when I upgraded to the latest-and-greatest-at-that-time kernel, it renamed my block devices.* My old kernel treated SATA devices like IDE devices, so they were named /dev/hdX, where X was some appropriate letter. However, since SATA only has one drive per channel, it actually skipped every second letter. Given the two channels of IDE on the motherboard† taking up hda through hdd, my SATA devices were hde, hdg, hdh and hdk. And then the drives on my PCI IDE controller were hdm through hdp.

Um, yeah.

Anyway, when I updated the kernel, it turned out that in th -

[Excuse me, something bad just happened. I was running badblocks again and it froze, apparently taking the disk offline. Doesn't seem inclined to bring it back, either. Unlike the old kernel, though, the system went neither clunk nor splut, which is at least some improvement.]

- in the process of patching this problem, they had changed things so that SATA drives were now pretend SCSI drives instead of being pretend IDE drives, and were now assigned device names starting with /dev/sda. Of course, my RAID arrays were built using the old device names, and so it, well, I believe the term is failed to proceed.‡

So I went back to the old kernel.

The very latest kernel, as it happens, takes care of all that, automagically fixing my RAID settings and bringing up the appropriate filesystems. Still borked, unfortunately.

[badblocks actually just reported in after a long nap, and then rolled over and went back to sleep.]

However, upon testing things with badblocks, or ϖ∂ as I like to call it, it seems that things are not much improved in terms of actually working. In terms of not bringing the entire system down, though, 2.6.10 scores major points.

So a win, more or less. Some more fiddling around for Pixy, and I'm probably still in the market for a good, cheap, four-port SATA controller. And don't mention the name "Highpoint", or I might be forced to bite you.

[Oh look, Lina just fell over. How about that. The one box that hasn't been giving me fits, and the place were all the munu backups are kept. Splut.]

* Equivalent to drive letters on Windows, except that on Linux you don't normally see them.
† Actually four, but I was only using two because the kernel I originally used didn't support the chipset for the other two.
‡ Some details of this might be wrong; I am going from memory here, and that is only slightly more reliable than my computers.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:58 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

I've been fiddling with my old Linux box (Yuri) today, and splutted it twice. Or splutted once and nearly-splutted once; the second time I managed to get it to do a controlled reboot rather than having to switch it off.

This tends to happen whenever I do a very large amount of disk activity on my main RAID array - which is a degraded RAID-5, which is the main reason I'm doing all this messing about with the new computer and copying files back and forth and running checksums and so on.

What's interestink is that there are no disk errors in the log files. None. I do have the dreaded "screaming interrupt" message - rather a lot of those - but no disk errors. Which suggests that the disks are fine but I might need a new SATA controller.

Oh good, I think; a SATA controller will be cheaper and easier to install than a new hard disk. Then I looked at the prices. It would be cheaper for me to buy a whole new motherboard with four SATA ports than to buy an add-on four-port SATA controller. Except that it wouldn't be a Socket A motherboard, so I'd have to buy a new CPU as well.

Hey, look! Adaptec are selling a 16-port SATA RAID controller. Not that I need one, or anything...

Update: I just kicked off a run of badblocks, a Linux utility that checks your hard disk for bad blocks.* All happy happy, then screaming interrupt, then lots of bad blocks, and then splut. (Which makes three spluts, and I'm out.)

Update: A new kernel might fix the problem. Unfortunately, right now I'm at work, and the box is home and splutted, so I can't try it out. Mmm, remote kernel upgrades...

Update: Ooh, shiny! Albeit expensive. PCI-Express x8, 16 SATA-II channels, up to 2GB of cache, RAID 0/1/3/5/6/10 support, optional battery backup...

* The developer originally called it ϖ∂.†
† Well, that looked interesting on my screen at work, but it turned out that this was largely due to my fonts being screwed up. I didn't think that particular letter of the Greek alphabet looked familiar. Rather making a hash of a throwaway joke in the process...‡
‡ In case I've now confused you, I replaced the turned-out-to-be-boring-and-ruined-the-joke symbols with something else.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:48 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Glenn Reynolds says that Andrew Sullivan thinks that he (Glenn) should be writing more about Abu Ghraib, and less about Newsweek's recent fuckup.*

I think that Andrew Sullivan has gone insane:

FOUR OTHER CITATIONS: Kos blogger Susan Hu has discovered four other media citations of the allegation that Gitmo interrogators desecrated the Koran: one from the Philadelphia Inquirer, and three from Human Rights Watch. Now we cannot know for sure - yet - if these allegations are real, or propaganda. But we do know for certain that other "techniques" designed to use religion as an interrogative tool have been deployed, including the smearing of fake menstrual blood on detainees' faces. This religious warfare was also deployed at Abu Ghraib. I wrote in my review of the official records of the torture

Okay, just for Andrew:

You say "We cannot know for sure - yet - if these allegations are real". In fact, we have no evidence whatsoever that these allegations are real.

You say that "we do know for certain that other "techniques" designed to use religion as an interrogative tool have been deployed". In fact, we have no evidence whatsoever that these allegations are real.

You refer to "religious warfare", on the basis of these allegations, when you have no evidence whatsoever that these allegations are real.

You say "I wrote in my review of the official records of the torture" in reference to Abu Ghraib. There was no torture at Abu Ghraib; that is, not after Iraq was liberated. Under Saddam Hussein Abu Ghraib was infamous for torture and murder; it was the prison from which people never returned.

The incident of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib has been investigated by the authorities, and the responsible parties brought to trial (and in some cases already punished). Despite being a relatively minor incident, it has been the subject of an ongoing leftist frenzy since it first came to light - at a time when it was already under investigation by military authorities.

It happened eighteen months ago. Oh, and no-one died, or was even injured.

The Newsweek story was published last week. It led to at least fifteen deaths - not that this is the fault of Newsweek. What Newseek can and should be faulted for is their impenetrable left-wing bias that blinds them to questions of fact, proportion and propriety.

Much, Mr Sullivan, like your own.

* Apparently this is now the accepted terminology in the mainstream media.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:17 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Via Radioblogger, this little snippet from Chris Matthews' Hardball discussing the Newsweek kerfuffle:

CM: This is a really tragic SNAFU by Newsweek.

RW: Oh, it's a tragic SNAFU, two paragraph article that has lasting damage to U.S. policy, to preventing a clash of civilizations that everyone has feared.

What's my point, you ask?

Well, both Chris Matthews and Robin Wright used the term SNAFU to describe this incident.

SNAFU doesn't mean "unfortunate mistake". It doesn't mean "regrettable failure to meet expected standards".

It means Situation Normal - All Fucked Up. So score one for an accurate representation of the mainstream media by the mainstream media.

* Specifically, the company that owns the Washington Post, the Washington Post Company, owns Newsweek. Also six TV stations and miscellaneous bits and pieces.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:46 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

So I'm comparing some backups with the originals to see if they match (in which case I can zap the backups, because I now have backups of everything, so I don't really need to keep backed-up backups of backups), and the system is sustaining more than 50MB/sec from the two drives containing the originals and the backups respectively. Which is pretty nice.

Also, my GeForce 6600 just arrived. It turns out that it does do HDTV output, but it doesn't have the cute little backplate for it; it uses this adaptor thingy instead that plugs in to a min-DIN connector. Less cute, but it doesn't take up a slot.

The only problem remaining is that I now need to replace faulty hardware in both my Linux boxes, reformat and reinstall... Except that one is a backup of the other. So I have to rebuild one of them, copy everything across, rebuild the other, and copy everything back. Yay for rsync and gigabit ethernet!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:56 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Newsweek 100 Point Publishability Test

Note: Your story must score 100 or more points on this test to be published in Newsweek. If you are unsure of any questions, ask your editor. That's why you have an editor, unlike those upstart bloggers.

Evidenciary Basis

Physical evidence or video/film footage: 80 points
Notarised or verified documentary evidence: 70 points
On-record first-hand source: 60 points
Independent confirmation: 50 points
Off-record first-hand source: 40 points
Second-hand source: 30 points
Some guy you met in the pub: 20 points
Random phone call, letters in crayon, email in ALL CAPS, mysterious voices: 10 points
Left-wing blog: 50 points
Right-wing blog: -50 points

Finance

Makes Newsweek advertiser(s) look bad: -30 points
Makes Newsweek competitors look bad: 30 points
Makes Newsweek competitors look so bad they might sue: -30 points

Other Considerations

Makes for a funny headline: 10 points
Allows Newsweek to maintain a pretence of neutrality: 20 points
Allows Newsweek to maintain a pretence of neutrality while getting in jabs at the administration: 40 points
Makes Democrats look bad: -20 points
Makes Europe look bad: -10 points
Makes America look bad: 50 points
Makes Republicans look bad: 70 points
Makes George Bush look bad: 90 points
Makes Karl Rove look bad: You may already have won!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:38 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

I've kicked off a program to catalog every file on every disk on every one of my computers, including helpful data like MD5 checksums, image and video file resolutions, audio sample rates, and stuff like that.

It might take a little while.

Update: 750,000 files catalogued so far.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:58 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

A GeForce 6600 (non-GT) is on the way to replace my X600 (non-XT). It won't, however, have the nice little HDTV output thingy that my X600 has. On the other hand, it will be 50% faster for running advanced 3D games like... The Sims 2... Which isn't available for Linux anyway.

I could have got a GeForce 6200 with half the speed and half the memory for 93% of the price, but somehow it didn't seem worthwhile.

Pixy's Tip of the Day: When you create an ext2 or ext3 filesystem under Linux, by default it will reserve 5% of the disk space for emergencies. On a one-terabyte volume, that's 50 gigabytes saved for a rainy day. And if you used the automatic partitioning option during the install, everything is one big filesystem, so you can't unmount it to fix it.

What's the tip then? You don't need to unmount it. tune2fs will work just fine on a mounted filesystem. tune2fs -m 1 will reduce the reserved space to a more modest 10 gigabytes, or you can use tune2fs -r to specify a precise number of blocks to reserve.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:08 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

1 A terrabyte?!?!?!

Posted by: Ted at May 16, 2005 09:13 PM (blNMI)

2 A terabyte!
And it's full.
Although once I've finished cleaning up, I'll reformat my old box and move everything back again.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at May 16, 2005 10:21 PM (+S1Ft)

3 I have computer envy; does that make me a bad person?

Posted by: phin at May 16, 2005 11:50 PM (Xvpen)

4 Speak English, darn you!

Posted by: Susie at May 17, 2005 12:43 AM (IPJ6q)

5 Kewl.
Thanks for sharing.
How the HELL can you have a terabyte of stuff? Isn't that like a whole Library of Congress? I've been collecting stuff for years and I don't even make a dent in my 200G drive.
phin,
As Moses said: Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's GeForce 6600.

Posted by: TallDave at May 17, 2005 07:15 AM (9XE6n)

6 TallDave -
Well, I haven't deleted anything since 1996. Every new computer I buy gets all the files from my old computer dumped on it.
And then there's the anime...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at May 17, 2005 12:10 PM (AIaDY)

7 Also, the Library of Congress is around 20 terabytes just for the text, so I have a ways to go yet!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at May 17, 2005 05:29 PM (AIaDY)

8 Wow, 20TB.
I bet you got them beat for anime though!

Posted by: TallDave at May 18, 2005 02:35 AM (9XE6n)

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A few months ago, both of the RAID-5 volumes in my Linux box went splut, as is wont to happen here at Pixy Central. Through the use of Vile Necromancy, I was able to reconstitute the volumes even though they had suffered multiple disk failures.

When I tried to back them up, though, they went splut again.

Anyways, I have this new wizzy Linux box here with a terabyte of disk* and I have - oh look - a terabyte of splut filesystems on my old Linux box. So I can just copy them across† and then I can manually unsplut the old system the easy way.‡ Only problem is, the /pixy⊗ volume goes splut clunk and dies when you try to read a lot of stuff (600GB, say) from it, so I decided to back up the /misa⊕ volume first.

Except I had a brain fart and typed in /pixy anyway.

And it's working. 390GB copied successfully so far. No spluts, no clunks. I think it hasn't yet noticed that I'm copying the Filesystem That Cannot Be Copied™ so I will tiptoe quietly away and leave it to its work.

Oh, and I just ran across Pixy's Tip of the Day for December 21, 2003. Thanks a lot, me. Though it ain't that easy to find old, reliable, well-supported PCI Express cards just yet. I thought an X600 would be reasonably safe - and maybe it's the card itself at fault. Yay for console mode, anyway.

And you know what? I still haven't played Knights of the Old Republic. I've even got the sequel now, and I haven't played the original. Considering that I've only recently caught up with games that came out in 2001, I may be a while yet.

Update: Did about 490GB before it splutted. Oh well.

* Yeah, I know I said 500GB. Well, I was walking past the computer store, and these little voices started calling out to me, and the next thing I knew...
† rsync over ssh using blowfish, 17MB/s. Not too shabby.
‡ Wipe the bugger clean and reinstall.
⊗ Yeah, /pixy.
⊕ Of course.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:32 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Fedora Core 4 Test 3 x86: Splut

Ubuntu AMD64: Installs successfully (the Ubuntu installer runs in text mode and is, frankly, crap), brings up nice graphical login screen, accepts my username and password, and then splut.

Windows XP: System doesn't even see the CD. Hmmm.

Looking for cheapish Nvidia PCI Express video cards now. Meanwhile I've left it running Memtest 86 just to make sure everything except the video card is good.

This makes three systems in a row where I've had trouble with the video card. My current Linux box, Yuri, couldn't cope with the GeForce FX 5700, though it's been happy enough with my old GeForce 4. My Windows box, Kei has had to have its video card replaced not once but twice. And now this. I have plenty of spare AGP video cards lying around - for obvious reasons - but this is my first PCI Express system so the parts bin is empty.

PC video cards these days seem to be Suck City.

Update: Installing Centos without X Window. At least I'll be able to use it, and I can update it later when I have a video card that works.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:40 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Centos crashes shortly after starting up X. Ungood. It's either the drivers that ship with Centos 4, or the video card. Given that I've had two flaky video cards in two years, my bet is on the card.

As a test, I'm going to try installing Fedora Core 4 Test 3, which should have the very latest of everything. I'll know soon enough.

Update: Splut.

It's just a little annoying, because this computer was delayed for two weeks while I waited for the video card to come in, and then I changed the order to a different model (costing an extra $60) which was supposed to be available the next day but actually took another week to arrive, and turns out not to work.

Bah.

Maybe it's a 64-bit driver issue. I'll try again with a 32-bit version of Linux tomorrow. That does kind of defeat the purpose though.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:45 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

1 Not yay...

Posted by: Susie at May 15, 2005 03:18 AM (IPJ6q)

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All assembled, plugged in, and booted into BIOS. CPU speed reports as 200MHz, which is a bit of a worry...

Time to burn myself an operating system and do a little installing, I think.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:26 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

So I'm putting my new PC together. So far I've installed the motherboard, the CPU, the video card.

I have one slot free.

Because the motherboard includes a wireless adaptor, which takes up one slot, and two USB panels, which each take up a slot, and a USB/Firewire panel, which takes up a slot. And the video card has a little daughter-board for HDTV, which takes up yet another slot.

Without actually installing any expansion cards, six out of a theoretical seven slots are gone.

Fortunately, the motherboard also includes eight SATA ports, two Gigabit Ethernet ports, eight-channel sound, and SP-DIF in and out, so I'm not in a hurry to add anything.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:08 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Rongorongo (Easter Island, C.E. 1800)

You are RONGORONGO. You are the script of the language Rapanui. The language is still spoken, but no one can read the script. Are you ideographic? Phonetic? Ideo-phonetic? Hieroglyphic? A comic strip? Illustrations for a fairy tale? No one knows.

Which Indecipherable Script Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

(Swiped from Renata's World, one of the Secret Munu Forums)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:33 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

I didn't even know they had the New York Times on Bizarro World:

As the old newsroom saying goes, "If it bleeds, it leads." And while it is understandable that newspapers like to report stories about violence, crime, conflict and mayhem, it means that good news is often relegated to the back pages, if reported at all. This happens the world over, be it in Boston, Berlin — or Baghdad. People who live in Boston or Berlin know, of course, that the bad news is never the whole story. Baghdad, on the other hand, is far away, and Westerners have no choice but to rely on reporters to tell us everything that is happening there. And while there's no denying that there is much bad news — the recent spate of audacious attacks by the insurgents is a prime example — the international press has been so focused on the setbacks that few readers are likely know about [sic] the daily parade of small triumphs that mark slow but steady progress. Consider a month's worth of such stories.

Arthur Chrenkoff, Helene Silverman, Norman Hathaway.

(via Tim Blair)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:51 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

All the sundry components for my new computer are now safely scattered about my living room, waiting to be, like, plugged in.

I'm thinking of doing a full review of the process. With pictures! And benchmarks!

Now, Fedora Core 4 Test 3, or Centos 4? Hmm. Fedora Core 4 will be out in a month, but I can't wait a month. And reinstalling this box once it's in production could prove irksome. So I'm leaning towards Centos this time round.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:07 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Canada, 2005:

A senior government official said the prime minister won't be taking any direction from Clarkson.

"The Governor General receives advice from her first minister. She doesn't tender it," the official said.

On 17 October Whitlam told an interviewer that the Governor-General could not intervene in the crisis because he must always act on the advice of his Prime Minister.

First time as tragedy, second time as farce.

* For my overseas readers, Governor-General Sir John Kerr sacked the Whitlam government on November 11, 1975.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:05 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

The UN Dispatch, a blog sponsored by - but in no way representing the opinion of - the United Nations Foundation, has developed an unhealthy fixation on Roger L. Simon.

They ask,

Is Simon's hyper-focus on a single UN-related issue based on deep convictions? Unbending principles? Moral outrage?

Meanwhile at Daniel Drezner's blog, Suzanne Nossel is trying to convince the regulars the UN is not completely corrupt, comparing the UN's misappropriation of billions of dollars of Iraqi money to the fact that there is inadequate documentation for $100 million of US money spent on aid programs in Iraq. She does admit to some UN weaknesses:

Non-Proliferation - Top of mind this week, due to all the ferment over North Korea. This one's largely the fault of the Member States for not strengthening the UN's non-pro mechanisms. See this post at DA for more.

Combating Terrorism - The UN's anti-terror mechanisms are pretty weak. Annan has proposed a series of ways to strengthen them, and the U.S. ought to get behind this agenda.

Human Rights - The UN's human rights mechanisms have essentially been held captive by rights violators. This has got to change, and once again Kofi Annan has the makings of a good proposal on the table.

Public Relations - Always a weak spot, and one that undercuts the organization's effectiveness in many other areas.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:14 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Picked up my new toys today! Athlon 64 3200+, Gigabyte K8NXP-SLI, Logitech diNovo Media Desktop, Abit RX600 Pro-HDTV, and various bits and pieces.

Now I just have to take it home and put it all together...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:28 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

1 Yay!

Posted by: Susie at May 11, 2005 03:30 AM (IPJ6q)

2 Are you going to run a decent OS on it, or will you load up Windows?

Posted by: Any A. Mouse at May 11, 2005 04:45 AM (kCb5q)

3 Oh no, this is going to be a Linux box. No Windows for this baby.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at May 11, 2005 09:33 AM (+S1Ft)

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