technology: March 2006 archives


You Thought I Was Insane Before

[ rakaur on Fri Mar 31 at 01:45 AM // category: apple, hardware, technology ]

So, all the stuff I read about MacBook Pros emitting weird noises didn’t worry me much. I mean, what are the odds I’ll get one of those when the one I ordered was fresh off the assembly line?

Well, crap, mine has one of the noises. The worst one I’ve heard is something related to the display, which is ungodly awful. Mine’s not that bad. Mine’s the “processor noise.” Apparently the power inverter, when drawing below a certain amount of power, cycles at an audible frequency. It’s not really horrible. Even with minor ambient noise in the room (such as my other computers running) you don’t notice it. In a quiet room, all alone (like, say, studying or in an office) it will slowly drive you insane. Some guy wrote an application that uses 8% CPU, which stops the noise. Apple has reported they are “working on it.” If it’s something the hardware is emitting, only another hardware rev will fix it, which would suck for current owners. I dunno, it doesn’t really bother me too terribly much. In a quiet enviornment it bugs me though.

Hopefully they’ll have it fixed with something Software Update will get for me by the time I start school.

-- rakaur // 2006.03.31 @ 01:45 AM

Toys to Come

[ rakaur on Thu Mar 30 at 01:23 AM // category: technology, web ]

I updated the Toys bit. I still need to add my laptop and my new iPod. Maybe tomorrow. I’m busy tomorrow, so that means Friday, but I work Friday through Sunday, so that means Monday, but I have a thing Monday, so that means never, pretty much.

-- rakaur // 2006.03.30 @ 01:23 AM

Speaking of Mail

[ rakaur on Mon Mar 27 at 06:12 PM // category: apple, hardware, software, technology, unix ]

So, FedEx blows. When they shipped my battery, it took like a week for them to even get it on a truck to my city. From California. It seriously sat there for a week “Arrived at FedEx location, Sacramento, CA.” Then, a day later, “Arrived at local FedEx facility, Earth City, MO.” It never even left! Good job, assholes.

And now, they finally shipped my laptop, but FedEx is going to bork something. It says, all of this for today, mind you:

Look at the times. Yeah, you try figuring that out.

Anyway, in other news I finally bit the bullet and tried to set up my own mail stuff. It wasn’t so bad. I have a pretty nice setup going, using:

With lots of anti-spam, and goodies like virtual accounts, virtual domains, virtual IMAP accounts, TLS, SSL, SASL. Good stuff. Everything seems to be working okay. Now to figure out how to get my mail out of Gmail.

-- rakaur // 2006.03.27 @ 06:12 PM

woot

[ rakaur on Sun Mar 26 at 11:22 AM // category: apple, hardware, technology ]

They finally shipped it.

-- rakaur // 2006.03.26 @ 11:22 AM

On Site Issues and Past Bloggage

[ rakaur on Thu Mar 23 at 03:13 PM // category: apple, hardware, life, nikki, relationships, technology, unix ]

Ok, so, apparently there’s a markdown script for Python now. So no more ghetto PHP shit. Yay. Site should be way faster now.

These are posts I wrote in a text file while cyndane was down. Start at the bottom.

I’m so fucking sick of portage. Every time I try to do any updates, I get shit about “ARRRR ALL PACKAGES ARE MASKED!!!!” or retarded stuff like “PLEASE UPGRADE YOUR PACKAGE TO USE TOOLCHAIN.BLAH.BLAH.” What the fuck does that even mean? Seriously? If I ask anyone I get told to go to the forums and RTFM, but why should I have too? Shouldn’t this shit be working by now? How old is Gentoo again? You would think by this time they’d manage to break portage only ever other sync.

I’m sick, sick, sick to death of having to tweak every little thing, every file in /etc/portage/ every time I want to add a new package. I’m sick of hearing people telling me to stop using Gentoo, “switch to Distribution X!” Yeah, because that’ll be any better. I used Red Hat, sucked. I used Mandrake, sucked. I used SuSE, sucked. I used Slackware, sucked. I used Debian, sucked marginally less. Come to think of it, isn’t nVidia making FreeBSD drivers these days? Probably not for AMD64 though. They can’t please everyone, I guess. I refuse to use Windows, and I’m sick and tired of the file-editing-hell that is Linux.

Something tells me I’m going to be using my new laptop for a lot more than school. It makes me want to buy an iMac right now, but alas, I am poor. I’ll be paying off the laptop for two years as it is.

What the hell is wrong with guys? What makes us despise the other men our women have slept with? Why is it that we can sleep with as many girls as we want and it’s not a big deal, but when a girl sleeps with a guy it’s a point against her?

I honestly don’t think this way. I honestly don’t believe in the double standard. It’s stupid. If guys are allowed to fuck every girl they see and get away with it, then girls are allowed to fuck every guy they see and get away with it. In my mind, that’s how it should work.

But then, I don’t really believe that. That’s how I know it should be, but I still get upset when I think about my girlfriend’s past. She’s been with four guys, including me, and she’s 17. One of them was a one night stand with a stranger that got her pregnant. I know, it sounds pretty horrible, but if you knew the whole story it’s not so bad. But I still find myself thinking about it, and finding it hard to accept. When I think about the guys being with her, it just makes me want to kill them. I don’t understand why. Why do I think like this? If it was a 17 year old guy that had done four chicks he’d be famous, but why do I think like this? I know truly that the double standard is bullshit, but I still can’t help thinking this way. I know she was taken advantage of in two of the four situations, and the other two were out of love (even if a bit young to be doing so), but I still find myself having problems accepting it from time to time.

Do women think like this? Is it a turn off when you know a guy has been with a bunch of different women, or is it just something guys do, and that’s it? Does it matter if he’s just having one night stands with all of them or if he was involved with all of them? Is it just the same all around? Is a guy considered “damaged” if he sleeps around? Why are girls? Is it the physical part of being “used” because they get a dick in them? Is it the physical part of being stretched out from having sex or becoming loose or something else? Why is it okay for guys to have sex as often as they want with as many people as they want but when women have sex it’s dirty and they should be ashamed or else they’re skanks?

We have great sex. I mean, it’s really, really good, and we both enjoy it very much. But if I think of her for one second enjoying it with someone else, past present or future, it makes me sick.

I just don’t understand why I still feel like this.

So I’ve gotten in quite a bit of my orders from my loan. Half of my Apple Store order has come in (none of it useful). The iPod and backpack are both here, but obviously neither one is really useful to me until I get the MBP itself. The MBP and the extra battery have gone further into shipping delay hell, but I expected as much. It’s gone from an estimated shipping date of the 17th to the 27th. Good luck, I guess.

My new wireless router from NewEgg also came in. It’s a Netgear, WPN824. I went with Netgear this time because my Linksys turned out to be a giant piece of shit. The DHCP server on the thing never once worked. The wireless cut in and out constantly, and it would just randomly not do anything. That’s why I had cyndane doing my routing and just used the Linksys as a switch and WAP. This thing’s pretty nice though. It supposedly boosts range considerably, but I haven’t noticed anything. It’s about the same on my mom’s computer as it was with the Linksys, and I haven’t had a chance to test the range outside of my house. I’m hoping that it will be good enough so that I can sit in my backyard when it gets warm and do school work, etc. The one thing I’ve always hated about computers is that I have to be inside to use them, and I love being outside.

It’s got some nifty routing things, and you can even reserve IP addresses per MAC with the DHCP server. It has a limit of 20 port fowarding entires. Why? That shit pisses me off. There’s absolutely no reason to have any limit on it whatsoever. The Linksys was worse, it was 10. I don’t think I’ll use 20, but it’ll probably be more than 10. It’s some bullshit. Kind of making it better, it supports UPnP port mapping. So, programs that know about UPnP, like Azureus, can map the ports automatically. I don’t believe there’s a limit on this. However, I doubt seriously there’s a lot of programs supporting UPnP out there. It’s not exactly an easy thing to just toss into a program.

Another thing are the lights. It has seven internal antennas, in a dome on the top. For some ungodly reason, they decided to put LEDs on them so you know when they’re active. Unfortunately, they change configurations a few hundred times per second, and these lights are really bright. Suffice it to say it’s always Christmas at my desk now.

Also, the thing was made out to be a little box by the Netgear pictures. I figured it was no bigger than my cable modem. So I get the thing and open the box, and it’s pretty fucking huge. It’s bigger than the Linksys. It’s nicer to look at, but still massive. Ah well, what can you do.

Now I have to wait another two weeks for my real toy.

Well snap, it wasn’t the PSU. I got another PSU in there and it still made the same sound. So I got a little closer and determined it was the case fan. So I took that out and put the other PSU back in, and it started making the sound again! Somehow it burned out both fans.

Anyway, I turn it on and it won’t boot. After some fscking around, it’s pretty clear the drive is also dead. Jesus Christ, what else on this thing bit the dust? So now I have another hard drive coming, and I’ll have to reinstall FreeBSD before anything’s back up. It was my server/router/firewall, but since its death my new wireless router came in, and it has NAT/SPI, so I don’t have to worry about using cyndane to do that now. So all it’s missing is my server stuff (web, svn, XMPP, mail…). I guess I’ll take this opportunity to throw FreeBSD 6 on it. I never upgraded from 4 to 5 because I never liked 5. Hopefully 6 doesn’t suck.

So, apparently I’m screwed. There was a storm, and it fried cyndane’s PSU. I don’t know why. I have a rather expensive surge protector, and a power regulator, and everything else attached to the strip is fine, but not cyndane! When I turn it on it makes this horrible whirring sound like the fan is stuck.

So, I took it apart. The fan is almost impossible to move with my fingers, so there’s something fucked up with it. Guess I need a new PSU.

-- rakaur // 2006.03.23 @ 03:13 PM

Site Issues

[ rakaur on Thu Mar 23 at 02:40 PM // category: technology, web ]

Yeah, I’m still setting this stuff back up after the crash. For some reason PHP is truncating my posts (the blog is in Python, which is fine, but then when it comes to doing Markdown with PHP it truncates). I had the same problem before, but I can’t remember how I fixed it.

Anyone?

-- rakaur // 2006.03.23 @ 02:40 PM

The Waiting's the Hardest

[ rakaur on Wed Mar 08 at 08:08 PM // category: apple, hardware, technology ]

So, I’ve been busy with my bank, who suck. My friend got a custom $2,400 loan over 36 months. My bank’s minimum is $3,000 over 24 months. After fifteen minutes on the phone and my loan officer’s unending ruthlessness I got mine extended to 36 months. Unfortunately, the APR is ungodly, even with it being secured by the title to a new truck. I’m thinking if it gets bad enough, I’m going to find some 0% APR credit card and transfer it to there. Then, after that runs out, find another one. That’s what my parents have always done, and, trust me, they are the masters of debt.

But anyhow, I got the loan. I ordered my stuff as soon as I got home. I went a little crazy, and got something that I could have avoided, but, you know, whatever. So I ordered

The last one is obviously the one I didn’t need for school. After all, I have a perfectly good fourth-generation. I found someone to buy my 4G for $200, though, so it’s not a complete loss. A net of $100 for a new iPod is probably worth it. So far, only the iPod has shipped. The backpack is supposed to ship tomorrow. The MBP and battery have an estimated shipping time of 2-3 weeks.

I also ran over to NewEgg and got a new wireless router/AP. I have a mind-blowingly awful Linksys BEFW11S4. It’s old, too. It’s never given me anything but problems. If I’m going to be depending on a notebook I don’t want to have to wire it to my network every time I need to transfer a lot of stuff, so I needed a G router. I’ve had nothing but bad luck with Linksys products (the router I have and a shitty KVM), so I went with Netgear this time. I got their flashy new B/G router with seven internal antennas and bells and whistles, etc. I would have gone with Apple’s AirPort thingy, but it only has one LAN port, and I have two wired computers. My notebook will ship with a G card, and my mother’s computer upstairs has a B card, but she doesn’t really need anything more. The Netgear gadget is supposed to double the range or something, so hopefully it will work in my back yard despite being placed in my basement. I can’t really put it anywhere else. My router/firewall computer deals with the Internet, and it’s right down here. Even if I moved it, I’d have to either buy another WLAN card or run a patch cable for my desktop.

I sure hope Macs are as good as I think they are. I have distant dreams of replacing my mother’s PC with an iMac.

But then, it’ll be a while before I get to see any of it. Except of course the iPod (which I won’t even be opening until the MBP gets here to use it with).

Now I get to be even poorer for a long, long time.

-- rakaur // 2006.03.08 @ 08:08 PM

Eric on Rails

[ rakaur on Wed Mar 01 at 10:13 PM // category: programming, technology, web ]

So, I’m thinking of redoing my site again. Yes, I know, I said I’d never redo it again. I’m going to keep the same design (unless someone redesigns it to not suck, but I’ve completely given up any hope of making one myself).

Right now, my site is done in mostly in Python, as it was my favorite language at the time. The blog is done in Python, with the help of the PHP Markdown script—which all of the posts are formatted in—by way of a huge, mind-blowingly kludgy hack. The static pages are just text files, rendered by PHP Markdown.

Shortly after I wrote my site, I got hooked on Ruby. At the time, Ruby support in Apache (a la mod_python) was not so great, so I didn’t rewrite my site. But now, everything has changed.

Now, there is Ruby on Rails.

Rails is really cool, and while I don’t completely understand it at the moment, it could allow me to make nice changes (such as being able to edit a post without mucking around in the DB or writing my own edit stuff) fairly easily, with a few lines of code here and there. It’s really organized, and really nice. Another benefit of doing it in Ruby is that there’s a pure Ruby implementation of Markdown, called Bluecloth, so I wouldn’t have to do the nasty, batshit crazy hack I have in there right now. I don’t know if I have the energy for it, between work, girl, and my other projects.

So, if anyone wants to make it worth my time by contributing a new design, I’ll do it. But otherwise, I dunno. It’s iffy at best.

-- rakaur // 2006.03.01 @ 10:13 PM

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