Too Close, So Far

I know a lot of people on the Net. Or, rather, I know *of* a lot of people. Would I call these people friends? Not many of them; I don’t really know them at a sufficiently personal level to think of them as friends. Acquaintances, then? Some of them, certainly. Many though, are people I know of by having been led to them through some other means (search engine, posting, referral, etc.) and they in turn aren’t necessarily even aware of my existence. A ‘fan’ then, perhaps.

On the Net though, everyone is equal. When someone’s name comes up via a comment or a link or such, it’s not immediately clear just what the relationship is; there’s often no distinction between a lifelong pal, a beer buddy, an acquaintance, or plain old hangers-on. As a result, someone’s circle of friends can appear to be larger than it really is.

This can lead to some odd behaviour, at least so far as I’ve seen. If a particular topic of interest comes up, someone may be inclined to comment on it. But, given the circles of friends that are already established, that person may also be afraid of overrepresenting their relationship with this group, and feel uncomfortable posting. Why would they care what some random bozo barges in and says, after all? Who are you to just show up and start spouting off? But, on the other hand, how else do connections get established in the first place? These circles had to start somewhere and develop somehow. Plus, those circles may not actually be as strong as they might seem to an outsider, due to the effect above.

I would imagine that there’s at least some portion of the Internet population who *want* to reach out to other people, but are afraid to, but for reasons that are often illusiory, but difficult to clarify. The question is, how do you break the cycle…

Smooth

Whoo, fully upgraded from Slackware 9.1 to 10.0 in just under two and a half hours. And without rebooting, even — uptime is still 77 days and counting…

The only major pain was updating config files in /etc, but even then the differences were pretty minor (Slackware’s major draw is that it keeps things pretty simplified and straightforward for power users, so there aren’t umpteen zillion layers of wrappers that get completely rewritten from release to release). The only annoying one was Apache, due to some loadable modules being moved around.

Now to see what all the hubbub over GNOME 2.6 and the new Nautilus is… Tomorrow. Zzzzz….

Update:
So far only two things seem broken: SpamAssassin had to be reinstalled because it likes to hardcode paths to the Perl library directories when you ‘make’ it, and the session startup path to ‘gkrellm’ had to be adjusted since it’s an official package now and thus moved from /usr/local/bin to /usr/bin.

I don’t really like the new ‘spatial’ method of traversing folders in Nautilus in GNOME 2.6; I like my directories deep and don’t want six gazillion windows open just from browsing through them. Fortunately though, it’s configurable. Somewhere…

Thanks For The Quick Turnaround…

A bit over a month ago I placed an order for the iRiver iGP-100 from a dealer in the States, and only just now did I get a notice that they’ve cancelled the order due to the item being discontinued.

Gee, thanks. Yes, it may be an older item, but when you claim you have some in stock and allow me to order it, I’d expect to, you know, actually receive one…

So, the search is on yet again. It’s a shame too, since the iGP-100 hit pretty much the perfect price/feature point for me, and they don’t appear to be interested in continuing that line of players.

Not Quite So Portable

Hmmm, maybe carrying my camera around in my jacket isn’t such a good idea after all. The extra movement is already causing some of the print on the dials and such to rub off. I have a case for it, but then it’s too bulky to carry around in the jacket anyway.

Ah well, I think I’ve already photographed everything vaguely interesting in my daily life anyway… Time to dig through the archives.

Fat Fingers And Laptops

I like my iBook well enough, but dammit, whenever I’m typing I often accidentally hit the up arrow whenever I go to press the Shift key. If done in the wrong order, this causes the whole previous line I just typed to be highlighted and then overwritten by the next character I type before I notice what’s happening. Grrr…

Maybe I need to take proper touch-typing lessons. You’d think after all this time I’d be good at it, but my fingers are still mostly all over the place…

My PC Has Turned To The Dark Side

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic is a great game, but it’s still pissing me off mightily. Why? Simple, it seems like I can’t go five minutes without the stupid thing crashing on me… It crashes when it loads new areas. It crashes at the start of cutscenes. It crashes if I look at it funny.

It’s somehow related to the video drivers, since the debug dump is almost always in ‘atiogl.dll’ or something like that, the ATI OpenGL subsystem. Reverting to the previous version of the ATI Catalyst drivers helps; it now only crashes every dozen or so area changes instead of every other one. Except that there’s a bug in that version of the drivers that makes the frame rate choppy…

Ugh, this is part of what’s driving people to develop and play games on consoles like the X-box instead. Its version of KoToR certainly doesn’t have these problems…

Update: Although the latest ATI Catalyst drivers are version 4.6, I apparently have to go back *four* whole releases to 4.2 if I want KOTOR to be stable and run smoothly. Wheee…

Sony Finally Wakes Up

I’ve written before about how disheartening EverQuest has become lately, and it looks like there’s finally some acknowledgement from Sony themselves that there’s something fundamentally wrong going on. They recently invited a bunch of high-profile players from the community (high-end guild leaders, experts in particular classes, etc.) to visit them at a summit to try and work out just what’s wrong with EQ nowadays and what can be done to try and fix it.

Here’s one report of the summit from the perspective a community leader of enchanters, the class I play. Some smaller improvements are coming soon, though nothing really substantial yet about the ‘big picture’, but at least they’re listening and acknowledging that things could be improved…

The New Old Version

Firefox 0.9 is out now, for better or for worse (good: bugs fixed, bad: hideous new default theme).

On the Windows version, they made a slight goof though. It looks like it imports all of the previous configuration settings, but the version of the browser reported in the user agent string is one of those settings, so it continues to identify itself as Firefox/0.8 if you do an upgrade from 0.8. OOPS.

The OS X version seems to report the correct version after an upgrade, though.

If someone really needs to tell the ‘fake’ 0.8s apart from the real 0.8s, the ‘fake’ 0.8s also have ‘Gecko/20040614’ as part of the user agent string.

A Mystery

Hmmm, I seem to have a stowaway on my Windows partition. A drive was making odd sounds so I went to check the Event Viewer for any warnings (it turned out just to be the image preview application doing very inefficient I/O) and I noticed a start message for a device driver named ‘nenum13E’. Odd. It doesn’t have a meaningful service description associated with it, either. Strange. Google turns up nothing, so it’s not a well-known program, and could be a randomly-generated name. Suspicious. And it runs out of a temporary directory. *Very* suspicious.

A virus scan doesn’t note anything unusual, though. The other major possibility is spyware, but neither Ad-Aware nor Spybot pick anything up either. That’s unlikely anyway since I’ve always been up-to-date on security patches and don’t use that system very much for browsing.

It should be safe enough to delete it, since nothing system-critical should be running out of a temporary directory. :-P I’m still curious as to what it actually is, though…

The Quest For Quiet

It’s upgrade time again. This time around though, it’s not really about performance; although it’s over two years old, my Athlon system is still pretty much fast enough for the games I want to play. No, this time around the upgrades are focusing on getting some FRIGGING PEACE AND QUIETstability and noise abatement.

Upgrade #1: Power Supply

I’ve been experiencing a number of weird crashes and spontaneous reboots recently, and I think a large part of the problem was that the power supply simply wasn’t keeping up. 300W might have been good enough when I originally put the case together, but a lot has been added to it since then. Thus, the first step was to replace it with an Antec TruePower 480 unit.

It’s hard to tell whether it’s helped with the stability or not yet since the crashes were rather sporadic, but it certainly couldn’t hurt. It’s also has low-noise fans, which help a bit, but not entirely (see below).

Upgrade #2: Memory

Bumping the memory from 512M to 1G has vastly improved playability in a few cases, and EverQuest in particular. No more choppy framerates or disk thrashing leading to facing the wrong direction, casting too late, timing out while zoning, etc.

Upgrade #3: CPU

Okay, this round *is* partly about performance… Since it wasn’t really a priority I didn’t want to have to go all the way and do complete memory and motherboard replacements as well at a much higher cost, so instead I just went from an Athlon 1700+ to an Athlon 2400+, the highest Socket A CPU this same motherboard supports. Not really necessary, but it was cheap. According to the sensors it runs cooler than the old one too, so maybe that’ll also help with stability.

Unfortunately, my noise problems still aren’t fully resolved. It turns out that the vast majority of the noise is from the hard drives, and replacing them is a bit iffier. Partly because a) I don’t really need more space right now, b) there’s nothing else really wrong with the drives and if I want to reduce noise then I can’t even reuse them in another system, so they’re wasted if I replace them, and c) I hate reinstalling stuff. One of the drives is only 12G, so I could probably take it out without much hassle, but it’s also the primary boot drive…

Ugh, it just had to be the hard drives that were the major noisemakers.

Asteroids In Your Pocket

While wandering about looking for information, I discovered that there’s a PocketPC port of MAME, the arcade game emulator. Woohoo! It’s a little on the old side, not having been updated in over a year now, but that’s okay; being the old fogey that I am, I’m mainly interested in the older games that are already included in that version anyway.

The PocketPC seems almost ideal for MAME — it’s portable, so that gives me a lot of games in a fairly small package for travelling. The PocketPC screen is taller than it is wide, just like most arcade screens, for efficient space usage. It already has a directional pad and buttons built-in, so you don’t need a joystick (can’t attach one anyway) or clumsy on-screen emulation. And it should be powerful enough to run all those older games that I want.

Of course, nothing is ever perfect…

Problem #1: Space. The emulator itself takes up about 7 megs, plus the roms (another 11 megs for the ones I want). That’s a lot when you only have 36 megs of memory to begin with, which then has to be split into ‘storage’ and ‘program’ memory and is already filled with various bits of junk. It should run from a flash card, but then a bit of juggling is necessary.

Problem #2: The controls. Although most games only need the joystick and one or two buttons, other features want to be assigned keys too. Coin insert, Player 1 start, Player 2 start, Quit, 3rd fire button, config screen toggle, etc., and there just aren’t enough buttons to define them all. You can at least get something workable if you dump all the ones you don’t really need on a single button though.

Problem #3: The controls, again. Although this PocketPC has the directional pad and buttons, they’re not all that well suited to gaming. There isn’t much feedback to the pad and it’s not well-aligned with each direction, so you can push downwards but it’ll register as left instead, or nothing at all. The pad is fine for normal usage where you can be more precise in how you push it, but it’s not so good in the heat of gaming. The buttons on the other hand have an acceptable feel to them, but they’re placed too close together and to the pad. With one thumb on the pad and one on the buttons, they’re often bumping each other.

Also, pushing on the pad and the buttons tends to make the whole PocketPC ‘wiggle’ a bit, since you’re only pushing on one end of it and there’s nothing bracing the other end. Annoying.

Problem #4: Sound. Although you can enable sound in a lot of the games, doing so slows it down considerably, and then it starts to sound awful and choppy anyway. You may as well just keep the sound off.

Problem #5: Speed. Even with the sound off, a lot of the games don’t seem to run at full speed. Even some fairly simple games like Elevator Action and Arkanoid, which were fine on my old 200MHz Pentium, are a bit slow on this 400MHz PocketPC. This isn’t exactly a high-end model though, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s something like slow memory at fault here.

Problem #6: Stability. After a few minutes of play it often freezes up or crashes, requiring a hard reset. I’m not sure if it’s MAME itself or the PocketPC to blame here, but regardless it’s rather pointless if I can’t play for more than that at a time.

Problem #7: Battery life. Although this device claims a battery life of eight hours, I can barely get three hours out of it while playing music on it, and that’s with the backlight turned off. It’ll be even worse when playing games full-tilt.

So close and yet so far. It’s one of those things that *seems* like it should work beautifully, but gets ruined in the details…

Expresso

Although I’m not using anything wireless right now, Apple’s recently-announced Airport Express device looks pretty nifty. Not for the AirTunes feature though; I don’t even have a stereo system (my computers *are* my home audio system) so that’s just marketing fluff to me.

No, what really interests me is being able to have a wireless USB printer server. I’ve often considered getting a printer, but I’m running out of USB ports, a hub would make the wiring mess even worse, and I don’t really have anywhere to put it that’s convenient and near the rest of the computers. With just this device though, I could stick the printer anywhere.

It also acts as a WiFi-to-Ethernet bridge, which has two added bonuses. I could set up a whole second network around the printer and the Airport Express would take care of integrating it into the existing one. Plus, I could also take it on the road and use it as a mobile access point so that I can always roam with the laptop regardless of whether or not the person or place I’m visiting even has WiFi (as long as they’ve at least got an Ethernet port free, of course).

I suppose it would help if I actually get a wireless card first though…

Oh Sure, Now You Tell Me

When I bought my iBook, I didn’t get many of the options or accessories with it. In particular, I didn’t get the Bluetooth module since I don’t have any other Bluetooth devices anyway.

I was recently investigating upgrade options though (I’ve got some new parts for ‘ekosiak’ on the way now), and I was curious just how much the Bluetooth module would cost, since one way of getting Net connectivity on the road would be to use a cell phone with Bluetooth capabilities as the connection. I was unable to determine how much it would cost though, because much to my surprise, it *can’t* be purchased separately at all.

It looks like the Bluetooth module is something that can only be ordered at the same time as the system itself, and the dealer has to install it. What really annoys me though is that there was no indication at the time I bought the iBook that this was the case. It was labelled ‘Bluetooth-ready’ in that you could add in the Bluetooth module, which to me implied that it was an upgrade that could be done at any time.

It’s not a fatal problem as there are third-party modules available (though then they take up a USB slot), and maybe I can convince a local dealer to order and install it separately anyway, but it’s still frustrating to discover this kind of information after-the-fact…

Conspicuous

While I was out for the evening walk tonight, I ran across something unexpected. At the top of the hill by the Jubilee Auditorium, there were a dozen or so people just sitting around on the grass and benches, all facing the same direction. As I passed by, the reason became obvious; they were art students doing drawings of that area (the Alberta College of Art and Design is also nearby).

Of course, they were all facing the sidewalk I had to walk down. It feels strange walking away knowing that there are a dozen or so young people, mostly women, watching your buttback as you fade into the distance…