24 Jul 2004
I’d been having a few good months, so I guess it was finally time to destroy a bit of gear. Nothing spectacular, unfortunately. It just went from being marginally fnarked to unbootable – originally, I was getting BIOS checksum errors (but it’d still reluctantly boot from a floppy, although IDE/ATAPI wasn’t anything more than a pipe-dream).
Downloaded FreeDOS, banged on AWDFLASH.EXE and (what it turns out WASN’T) the firmware, plugged it in, got errors. Overrode errors, screen goes black.
Josh says some bad words.
Josh (still in third person) looks at other screen, re-reads bad Taiwanese translation carefully. It turns out that the “latest” firmware under 693A wasn’t actually for that motherboard. God only knows what it WAS for… but me, I have no idea. So, kiddies. The moral of this story is that the /nbl switch for AWDFLASH is evil, and should never be used unless you’re 100% certain that it’s the right firmware, are God, or read Taiwanese.
Grr. I’ll bang the BIOS chip in another computer in a while and flash it with the correct image this time around.
23 Jul 2004
Finished up there today, and decided I’d go for another trip with Peter’s beeeeeeeaaaaaaautiful Sony DSC-P10 again. This time around they’re not as good, because I played with the zoom a bit too much, and lack sufficient motor control to stop myself from shaking(no tripod + zoom = blur, hehe)!
I went for a wander (okay, a brisk wander… more of a gallop ;) ) through Victoria Park at lunchtime today, snapping shots of gardens, and other things. The reason? Hmm. Well. I wanted to play with the camera, for one. And some of the photos are for a friend. They’re something of a personification, in response to a self-portrait…
Still, despite my shakiness and inability to control that beautiful camera, there are some decent shots in this lot (accessible at my Gallery page whenever my computer is on – direct link to album http://nicktangents.is-a-geek.com/gallery/view_album.php?set_albumName=vicpark23july04), or so I’d hope…
I’ve made the third image in the gallery my wallpaper, that’s probably my favorite of the lot… let me know what you think of them, if you think anything of them at all.
23 Jul 2004
Hmm. Well, that production sucked. That is to say, the performance was good, and the technical side of things was not so good.
Which only serves to further disappoint, it’d seem – there are some productions where there is little or no dependance on technical resources… but this wasn’t one of them. Then there are productions that suck so much because of the performance that technical can’t suck more. But this wasn’t one of them, either.
I could blame it on a whole heap of things. Lack of monitor, or even open windows the day prior (we couldn’t hear, so we didn’t know cues for performances). In the end, we didn’t get monitor even on the night, which was just frogging marvellous for trying to cue things (we were running the show from CD, because there wasn’t time to rip tracks to my laptop – I got there at about 4:15, having left Sydney Uni at 4:00, and we were in rehearsals from then until the show started). Dinner? Pfft! Fast food isn’t fast enough!
Yeah. There’s my justification for it. The real story is that our communications sucked, and logistically, it was impossible to have the right people for the right show. That, and authoratiarian control over everything right down to the bloody locks on the windows (which, might I add for future reference, WILL be broken if the show is about to start and they’re still shut, regardless to the cost or inconvenience incurred to the Dictators of SACS) certainly didn’t help matters.
Yeah, I’m angry, bitter and twisted. What’re you going to do? I’m not doing the show tonight, and I’m kind of glad. Maybe it’ll suck less. Maybe communication will happen. Maybe venue difficulties won’t be so prohibitive.
That said, there’ll still be no monitor audio, and the one guy with access to all required resources (and the one guy on payroll to do this stuff) has decided that it’s not convenient for him to be there. Good luck, Ben.
To year 12: Sorry, I’m glad you’re not getting marked on Technical.
20 Jul 2004
On what is meant to be a week working in an IT environment, I spent the day climbing on the roofs of some of the oldest buildings in Australia (completed 1862). And, better still, I was equipped with an incredbily sexy Sony DSC-P10 digital camera whilst doing so.
Of course, this meant I had to get Gallery up and running to share it all with the world, so check out http://nicktangents.is-a-geek.com/gallery/ for the images (server running on my desktop, so accessible only when my PC is turned on). What you see there was the result of a ~1 and a half hour trip, and an FTP upload to my home PC of an 80MB ZIP file. Hehehe. Not all of the images were relevant, there were originally 66. I removed the more boring ones of scaffolding from view (the scaffolding shots were my justification for the trip).
They let me onto the roof of the Quadrangle building, the Mungo MacCallum building, and the Bell Tower (that last one is like… “no-one goes here” territory. Mind you, not too many tourists go on roofs, but you get the idea.) – hence my desire for extensive photo-evidence of my trip ;) Hehe. It was 66 photos, the album contains 38 (the rest were painters and scaffolding and the odd tree).
So that was INCREDIBLY cool. Fortunately they’re sensible about safety over there, cautious without being prohibitively so… only “requirement” which they had was my use of a hardhat in a designated area being renovated (Old Teachers’ College). All roof-climbing was basically “don’t do anything stupid like go too near the edge”, which was incredibly useful, especially considering I was trying to take photographs… barriers and rails, etc. would have been seriously irritating!
In other exciting news, I scored a Pentium 3-866 today, as well as (what I think is) a TNT-2 and a Socket 370 mobo to match the Pentium 3 (onboard sound, too). Oh yeah, and also picked up a 10/100 network card AND an incredibly useful front-USB 5 1/4” bay plate. Hooray for a wasteful society, reap the benefits! Yeah!!! Hehehe. In between setting up Gallery and entering 38 descriptions, as well as miscellanous other things, I haven’t yet had time to test the hardware. It will happen! I’ll make it happen!
I promise as soon as I have that running, updates shall be posted…
19 Jul 2004
I decided at around lunchtime today that Sydney is the new Alaska. Random MSN conversations whilst doing “data entry” are an enthralling way to pass time… hehe. That’s about the only relevance of the news title to this post, although I still maintain it to be true. Tori was wearing 6 layers, not counting the cat worn (or endured?) as a scarf (n.b. I assume the cat was still alive. The LIVE cat was the scarf, she hadn’t killed one, so no-one go calling the RSPCA;)), whilst I was in an uberly heated office, yet still wearing 4… that means it’s cold, by my reckoning.
In my procrastination today, I discovered a cool app in PC Authority which is kind of like Bochs, only actually fastish. Apparently. I couldn’t get it to compile out-of-the-box on my SuSE baby, but I’ll tinker with some libraries and compile options later, and post if a) I remember to and b) It’s worth “writing home” about.
The application is called qemu, and can be found at http://bellard.org/qemu/ (redirects to a freehost) to anyone who cares to look. Just for the record, there ARE versions available for Windows, so don’t go calling me an elitist Linux snob who only cares about Linux software. Just think it. Because it’s true. I couldn’t give a stuff about Windows software, unless it does something incredibly cool that I haven’t been able to do for years over here ;)
Yeah. This thing is being touted as the OSS VMWare alternative in PCAU, so we’ll see what transpires in days to come, I’d imagine.
Anyway. Enough about emulation platforms which may or may not work on my computer. There’s a lot to be said for pre-compiled software that just works, you know ;) (note to the clueless – not pre-compiled software with a fifteen page list of depedencies. I don’t enjoy that.). That, however, doesn’t appear on my newly released wishlist, because really, it’d take half the fun out of running Linux. I might experience an increase in productivity!
Hmm. Productivity == achieved wishlist. Perhaps I should add binaries that JustWork™ to that list…
Anyway, take a look at it, even if just for fun. It’s all geek stuff, but that’s not the whole list… I was thinking in geek-mode when that list was written, tis all ;)