… then tore right through it.

Soon after Friday’s post, GNOME was installed. Excited, I restarted X, but was quickly demoralized by stumbling again across the X/hal/evdev Gentoo configuration issue-bug-thing. I had “fixed” KDE once before, but not, to my recollection, X in general. Long story short, after an hour of screwing around, I got basic X (that is, xev while inside twm or fluxbox) to properly handle my evdev-managed USB keyboard with the dvorak layout, but I cannot get GNOME to cooperate. I don’t know if it is trying to be overly clever, or there is some mystery config setting I can’t find, or it just hates me, but for the moment GNOME is seemingly unusable.

So instead I’m trying again Fluxbox, and rediscovering what I enjoyed so much about it in the first place. Simple and mostly out of the way, and nice-looking, to boot (I enjoy the Fluxbox look so much that my KDE looked somewhat like it for a long while). I don’t know if I’ll try GNOME again, or go back to KDE. For the moment, I’m pretty content.

Other random news: I did indeed buy that 8800GT (should be here in a couple days), I’m looking forward to playing Oblivion once again, and I also picked up Dead Rising for my 360, which slowly but surely is gaining more games and more play time.

Remember when I had all but sworn off video games?

Those were funny times.

KDE4 needs to improve. Sooner, please. My KDE3 install is feeling a bit behind, but 4 still has random bugs/issues (I can’t find the option to have the mouse wheel scroll through the desktop, automatic file preview in the open dialogs seems to be gone, Konsole performance blows, KWin exhibits random “that window doesn’t exist despite appearing in the taskbar” or “this window will always be on top, deal with it” bugs, so on and so forth.

I know it’s still in its infancy, but man, I need something new.

I’m installing GNOME. (What have I become?)

Also, I think I may buy an XFX PVT88PYDE4 GeForce 8800GT. The improvement over the 7900GT is supposed to be obvious. Maybe I can finally go back to a non-choppy Oblivion.

It’s time for changes, or something.

Random thoughts today:

• Etrian Odyssey II: Heroes of Lagaard comes to us North Americans in June. Check out Atlus’ promotional site.
• I think I let my Rock Band guitar skills lapse for too long. I did far worse on the Metallica songs than I have in the past, I still can’t get through Joker & the Thief on Hard guitar, and Suffragette City is equally unscalable on Expert guitar.
• It seems more likely that my video card is dying. I’ve been pretending to be interested in an 8800GT, but I’m not really sure how much I care until it no longer pushes air.
• Seriously, Etrian Odyssey II. I don’t know if I’ve looked forward to a game more in recent history. The gunner class looks like it could be interesting, and I’m even a bit excited about some minor details: more map icons (hopefully the hard limit on the number of icons you can place per map is gone, too), and, thankfully, you can now browse your characters’ equipment while deep in the store menus.

Now not with conflicting Apache options that broke the wiki!

If you were looking for that over the past, oh, 14 or so hours, it’s back now.

Thees murneeng ves system meeentenunce-a teeme-a, und I fuoond a neece-a leettle-a Vebeleezer cunffeeg sumeune-a poot tugezeer. Zee leest is a beet oold noo, boot it’s steell oone-a ooff zee mure-a cumprehenseefe-a SeerchEngeene-a leests I’fe-a seee. Huurey!

In oorder tu nut breek zee Internet, I’m gueeng tu leenk tu it unencheffereezed.

webalizer.conf with, among others, a nice SearchEngine list.

Börk! Börk! Börk!

(Tudey iff my persunel “telk leeke-a zee Svedeesh Cheff” dey, iff yuoo deed nut see-a yesterdey’s pust.)

Wow, Rock Monster on Scifi was a new level of bad. Not terrible, but it seemingly had no sense of how clichéd the entire presentation was. American boy meets foreign girl, foreign girl falls in love with vaguely interesting American tourist, evil wizard attacks town with rock monster, evil wizard kidnaps girl, American boy kills rock monster and evil wizard, sequel hinted at. We’ve all seen it before.

Not being religious, and not really doing anything else tomorrow, I’ve declared it “talk like foo day” where foo is a pirate (again), or Poshul, or whatever you’d like. Me, I’m going with the Swedish chef. Börk! Börk! Börk!

We’ll see how long it lasts, but I did make a little Irssi alias for it.

/alias chef exec - -o echo "$*" | chef

So not long after yesterday’s post about my DS case skin, I decided to sync my R4DS saves off the MicroSD card to my desktop (I have a little script utilizing rsync to make that easy for me), install the new firmware which fixes a couple interesting behaviors, and try out one of those R4DS skins.

And that’s when all hell broke loose.

After my backup/resync (just a backup, nothing new to put on my R4DS last night), I copied the new firmware to the MicroSD, picked a nice looking skin off the intertubes and copied that, and unmounted. Booted up, black screen, no R4DS shell. Uh oh. A reformat of the MicroSD card later, I’m at least getting the shell again, but no snazzy UI. An hour and a half of struggling to get anywhere later, I’ve gone to bed with a still un-skinned R4DS.

Another hour of mucking around today and I’ve come to the following regrettable conclusion: Linux doesn’t like the R4DS firmware, or it doesn’t like Linux. Copying the same firmware as always in Windows yielded me:

• No strange “whoopsie, it’s time to reformat” errors (it happened a second time following a firmware copy in Linux)
• Usable skins
• A good dose of befuddlement

Maybe there’s a bug in the vfat driver, or Windows does something different but expected when copying (what I can not fathom, it’s been a while since I’ve read stuff about FAT16/32 but I don’t see how two different drivers could both support the filesystem yet put files on disk in different ways), but there we have it. As a test, I did all of the firmware and skin manipulation in Windows and then went to Linux and rsynced my saves and — ahem — software, which has been fine so far. Just something wonky about the firmware (and maybe the skins, but those are just bitmaps, so I’m guessing whatever Linux vfat isn’t doing right was compromising the ability for those to be loaded), apparently.

This is all a long, meandering story quickly closing in on what I was originally going to write about: that Simply Duotone skin pack is nice.

… that I was actually decorating my console.

The glossy black was nice and all, but it captures fingerprints and smudges like you wouldn’t believe. And, I play my DS enough, I thought maybe it’d be good to dress it up a little (perhaps I ought to name it Vera?). So now I have a nice mostly-red DS Lite to still only play in my bedroom because I don’t get out that much. Nuri Tech is the manufacturer of the skin, anyone with a DS or PSP should check them out, they make quite the nice selection.

Worth mentioning that I bought mine off the tubes from Petra’s Tech Shop. I mention them because despite a little stocking mix-up, they offered to ship it direct, cheaper, and via priority mail (faster than what I’d paid for). So that’s probably worth a little recognition.

customer_service++

As I said I would, I finished my analysis/plotting of Framewerk, the system behind the game CthulhuTech. I’m tired of writing so I’ll just link to it and include a pretty picture.

CthulhuTech/FramewerkAnalysis - Empty Matter Wiki.

perl++
gnuplot++

The problem with having so many boxes to play with is that usually one of them gets a bit neglected. I still have a sort of love affair with my Mini-ITX router box, so that stays pretty regularly up to date, and my desktop is right in front of me most of the time I’m home, so I’m pretty good about that one too. The media PC not as much, but maybe once or twice a month it goes through the emerge rigors.

Which leaves Empty Matter.

It’s probably a good thing that I don’t touch it much, and I generally only (deep) update one component at a time, as servers like stability and all of that, and I don’t need to be taxing the CPU all of the time, but nevertheless, the Gentoo installation here tends to get a bit messy. And not by fault of Gentoo, do not get me wrong, but when you look at your cron logs and realize, by Cthulhu, I installed munin a couple months ago and forgot plum about it, that is not a good sign.

So last night (rather late last night, in fact) I decided I would try to fix a bunch of little bugs that have been showing up here and there. Most of them having to do with Apache, since that’s the majority of what this box does. Found some unnecessary 404s on the wiki because I never updated the default theme. Twiddled logrotate a bit so that I could actually have meaningful stats gathering.

Tonight is no different. Cleaned out my Apache root, removing some cruft and things scattered about following software uninstalls or my laziness. Removing some old cron jobs I no longer need. Checking my firewall configuration. Emerging a package or two while I’m poking away at random parts of the box. So very satisfying, this distraction of mine.

I had hoped to do a little analysis/plot of the Framewerk system as used in CthulhuTech, but my Perl coding went a little long and while I have plottable data, I’m not entirely convinced of its correctness yet, and I’m a bit puzzled how to plot the darn thing in the first place. Even when you factor in the three possibilities (highest single d10, largest N-of-a-kind, or highest-sum straight), there are bizarre holes in the results (did you know it’s impossible to get an 11? Or with five dice, there are 1,651 ways to get a 30, but only 45 ways to get a 28?) that don’t lend themselves well to a line plot. So suffice it to say that I have some verification left to do on these results before I go plotting. I hope to have that up tomorrow.

On the subject, I long for some CthulhuTech. Maybe this weekend…

I’ve written before about how, like what I imagine is common for music aficionados, I have a habit of associating music (generally, whole albums) with events in my life, or things I’m doing, or whatever. The concepts can be abstract “high school” or specific “that wide turn to the left around a hill somewhere right after Wildcat Mountain on Highway 33 heading east from La Crosse” (seriously), but they’re always associations that become hard to shake, in no small part due to how lovingly I embrace them.

In lieu of any sort of real informative update (er, I’ve been playing a lot of Etrian Odyssey and Rock Band, and so far fighting off my daydreaming of a new video card…), I decided to list another one, a more recent one.

Part of it, honestly, is because it is the merging of two suggestions I quickly grew to appreciate: Nightwish’s Dark Passion Play and George R. R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones. I’ve listened to Dark Passion Play too many times to count since I got it, and still have yet to finish A Game of Thrones (in part because I felt I was going through it too quickly), but nevertheless, this one is sticky. Two suggestions from two people. Doesn’t hurt that they arrived in the same box from Amazon.

For a week or two, my evening ritual was firing up DPP in Amarok, crawling into bed, and flying through five or so chapters of AGoT, enjoying both in tandem. The song that I think really makes the link, for whichever reason, is “For The Heart I Once Had,” which opens in a certain way that makes me think of cold Starks — I think it has something to do with the opening and the guitar bridge riffs. I don’t know why, so I won’t try to explain it.

Two updates this month… I must be getting sick. :)

I was poking around the administration panel for my account that hosts Empty Matter, and noticed that if I were to just make a small concession and shut down the server for a couple minutes, I could have another 200 or so MB of RAM and 4 GB of disk space. Not that I really need either (although I do on occasion bump the RAM ceiling), but they’re there for the taking, and that is kind of tempting.

However, the dilemma at hand is that there is also this:

cthulhu@ayu ~ % uptime
18:09:53 up 193 days, 7:22, 0 users, load average: 0.59, 0.54, 0.23

(Yes, the box is named ayu. Sue me.)

You can say that it shouldn’t entirely count because I don’t own the hardware, but this is by far (something like 60 days, I think) my longest uptime to my name. I don’t want to lose it.

The side of me interested in nominally better server performance (i.e. the rational side) wants to reboot, but what if this is my chance for uptime of over a year? I’m over half way there…