29 May 2004
For once. This is cool… I’ve got two pages of “To-do’s”, but at least I’m not weighed down by school work instead of being able to get stuck into the list.
Hehe… well, rather, I *should* probably be doing school work, but am not, as computer stuff is far more fun/profitable/both than school work ever was. I mean, seriously – aside from maths, and other content-driven courses (the only one which I am doing at the minute is Modern History), what exactly are we meant to learn in school?!
Okay, here we go – listing subjects, and then progressively attacking each and every one of them. Ready?
Advanced English: No comment. Insert comments about being assessed on under two sentences here. No, I’m still not over that bloody assessment.
Physics: Apparently it is more comprehension “can-you-read-the-question” now than it used to be – it’d help if we had a PHYSICS teacher to teach us, but hey. Until such a time as that situation changes, that is another subject in which nothing is being learnt. Private study aside.
ITF: That subject is something of a joke. Competent/Not competent provides amazing scope for doing absolutely nothing and being rewarded for it. I’d go so far as to call it communism.
Business: King-common-sense. Learn a few terms, tick the various boxes, write a report, unit completed. I like it, although it may be dead boring at times.
Extension English: Okay, I kind of enjoy this one. I’d go so far as to say that it’s right up there with Modern – that said, the reasons for my liking it are completely different.
As you can probably see, I’m not thinking too highly of most subjects at the minute. Modern is cool, because, well, the course is nice, and our teacher is great, and maths is… yeah, maths is, there is little more that is required to be said about it.
To break it down a little further, English sucks because the department is, well, a little bit… I’ll say “misguided” – you can think about who is supposedly guiding the department, and draw your own conclusions there. ITF sucks because the course is a “Framework” – which SACS apparently hasn’t really filled in too well (no, using a universities online curriculum to teach a course does NOT qualify as education), and because there are four classes in the one room, which does bend things towards anarchy, just a little. Physics sucks because the teacher isn’t a physics teacher, and the head of department is obsessed with a vegetable and pointed dots, and, finally, Business sucks because there is no thought required – that said, it is easy to see why that is a subject I’m doing fairly well in ;).
So yes. Time on my hands means whinging about departments, and code. Lots of code.
Wink nudge, a new feature possibly on the way.
28 May 2004
Dynamic IP addresses suck. Uberly overboard caching DNS servers suck even more. Platform 7 was apparently “out” today, because the schools’ DNS server didn’t think to resolve a CNAME record – of course, the address which the CNAME referenced was working fine, despite having changed less than three hours earlier, but to actually resolve the CNAME to this would have required a leap of logic which is evidently beyond whatever DNS software our esteemed IT department are using.
I’m a tad more irritated about it than I should be, perhaps, but really, given the amount of bandwidth that much extra name resolution requires, it’s somewhat insignificant next to a school full of students randomly downloading crap from all over the place. Or so you would think. Or I would think. Or something.
27 May 2004
Woooo!!! I’ve got myself a freebie PSU! Go council cleanups!
Hehehe… my parents started giving me looks telling me to get off the computer last night – so, I got off the computer, went into my room, pulled out the power supply, build a Pentium 2 box, and (somewhat nervously) plugged in the ATX power supply which I had just screwed back together, having been over it with a tissue soaking up any excess moisture left over.
Ahhh, the blissful sound of fans spinning up, and computers beeping because there is no monitor plugged in!! Actually, that’s not quite accurate. It didn’t make that much sound at all – it’s a really quiet PSU! Which is cool. Very cool.
350W of goodness, council cleanups rock :)
26 May 2004
Apparently, they’re releasing the source code for RealPlayer (Linux version) sometime in the near future. Whilst binaries of this have been available for some time (Real has been one of few major software vendors to commit to long term support of such a platform, which has been excellent – I won’t comment on the OTHER issues surrounding their software, but their cross-platform thing has been good).
Their Helix Community (Helix Player) project has been around and opensourced for some time (under the terms of their own license, the RPSL), but there is now talk and a suggestive line on the website which would imply that Real are likely to release the source to their flagship product, RealPlayer. “Coming soon.” is the official line next to the RealPlayer download link on http://player.helixcommunity.org – not that it matters much, because apparently the Helix Player now supports OGG, a handful of Real’s formats (that being the thing which they had previously held as proprietry and hadn’t been supported by the Helix product tree), as well as MPEGs plus a few million other weird and wonderful media formats. I haven’t seen anything indicating with any great certainty whether the RealAudio/Video and streaming formats are covered by this license, however this page would suggest that perhaps they have been… it seems like a completely unviable business direction to take, especially coming from a firm with something of a history of not so consumer-focused products (read: spyware).
Their encoding products have always been really easy to use, and just generally rocked, and I’m hoping that this move doesn’t affect that.
26 May 2004
Yay, it’s that time of year (I’ve never quite figured out how often it is) again, and it’s been raining for several days on and off, which is generally acknowledged to be a complete kill of any geek hopes of salvaging weird and wonderful posessions from the various piles in front of peoples houses.
Not THIS geek!!!
This morning I discovered something of a hidden treasure on my way to school – enclosed in a box which had previously housed one of those “entertainment system” mini-ish PC’s (this box was soggy, and people wouldn’t throw out a working system, which are the only two reasons I think it hadn’t already been nabbed by someone else) was a lovely Super Power case, complete with 350W power supply!!! Wooo!!!
Now, who had a power supply die on them a few months ago? And who had been putting off purchasing a new one for no real reason? YEAH!!!! MEEEE!!!!
Of course, because of the rain and all that, I’m unsure whether it actually works yet (I’ve got “attack PSU w/ hair dryer” written in my diary – no, seriously… if you don’t believe me, nab me sometime and I’ll show you!) – but its cool that someone just threw it out!!! Well… cool where cool equals extremely wasteful and uncaring about the financial or environmental cost of IT goods… but still!
I’m planning on going for a bit of a jog sometime later tonight to better scout my suburb for miscellaneous goodies that no-one else has found yet (seeing cleanup is technically Monday, I’m not too hopeful – generally, you’ve got about 10 hours after stuff is thrown out to find it. Walks late on Sunday night are good, but I forgot to, and on Monday I was at the Retreat :( ).
Should this thing work, I shall once again have a working P3, without any cost incurred to me! Woooo!
Yeah, the excitement shall wear off shortly – until then, I’ll not be able to concentrate on things that I really should… mmm… assessments. I found out today that apparently I have an ITF task due Monday. Not a big thing in itself, but I’m sure that I was never told about it… I’m kind of tempted to just not hand it in and say I wasn’t notified of it – sure, I’d fail it, but its almost worth it just to make a point. ARGH that subject sucks… its so tedious and unstructured – not to mention generally disorganised – we still haven’t got the LAST assessment back yet, and that was several months ago now. I can’t drop it, though – it counts for four units (inc. Cisco random stuff), and that’d take me below the required minimum of 12. Bleh!
Mmm capacitor discharge from wet powersupplies…