Older blog entries for magsilva (starting at number 100)

Spent the whole day fixing my computers: the good and old VLS, the Columbia and Atlantis. VLS is a 486, now with 20 MB RAM (it was 8 MB). The machine responds much nicer now, walla! Then I used it to test some hardware I thought was broken: DVD and CD readers, some cards, a keyboard. Everything but the SBAWE 64 was burned, literally. Even the keyboard (this is the first time that I saw one broken because of a power supply failure!).

Atlantis is a PPro 200. I just installed some software into it, no major hardware modification. Hum, the sbawe 64 is a nice addition, worthwhile indeed. I'll use it for writing some text, update my site, so on (this computer stays at my bedroom, much easier to use, whatever the date).

Finally, Columbia. It´s a whole new computer, now with everything just fine (software and hardware speaking). A really fast machine. Unfortunately, many people use it at home so I can´t do everything on it.

As you can see, all my computers have launch vehicle's based names. Columbia, actually, got destroyed one month after the real one and its crew died (one minute of silence). I'm glad to see my computer Columbia on again and I do hope the space shuttle's program restart, after everything is settled down, and the space, and the space restarts being explored by man at the pace it deserves.

After several days, I finish grabbing files and setting up the computer. Even the remote control is working now! There're some bits to setup yet (the ups communication, modem and hardware sensors) but nothing I can't live without. Till August, I think I'll have settle this down and created the RPM packages for the software I've installed. Great!

How simple things matters so much?! I recently bought a cable to use my stereo as my computer's sound output, what a difference! Now I can play UT2003 and watch animes without that infrared headphones (they were, are cool but too weak...).

Playing with Kmail's filters. And yes, spamassassin and its incredible statistical filter is enabled from now on! Nice piece of bit indeed.

Computer maintenance week. The free disk space saga continues. The first placa was cleaning by email. Oh well, not just clean but convert all them to maildir format. That took some time but I got 30 MB with this (I don't know why mbox wasn't being properly compacted with Kmail). The next thing was deleting everything unusefull (and that wasn't little). After all, 200 MB of freedom!

Started doing the backups too. I'll switch to a new computador (much faster!) next week, so much must be done before that. I hope it will be a smooth transition but...

Wrote a good study about the Conectiva 9's installation. Received a good feedback from it. Although Cl9 is a bit far from perfect, it's doing quite well. As I was a bit upset this weekend, some of my comments were harder than the truth. Today's email changed my mind a bit. Tomorrow night I'll do some new proposed tests, I hope that Conectiva Linux 9's defects get fixed as soon as possible and it become a sucessfull distro. If not, my best wished to Conectiva Linux 9.1 ou X, I'm sure they'll sucess.

God, do help Conectiva and give them light so that can correct their latest distro.

Spent my whole day fighting againt Conectiva 9 and its bugs. I don't know if I was one of the first to install it but I can just say it's a damn broken piece of software! I think it was more than twenty bugs! I hardly doubt all them can be corrected by update disks, so I can just hope Conectiva launches a 9.1 as soon as possible and erase 9.0 from its history. Too bad it went that way. Beside those bugs, the Conectiva 9 is nice: beautiful, easy, fast, full of software.

Enjoyed the Easter Day with some cousins and (almost) nephews. Oh, and upgraded VLS (my computer) to the latest Conectiva Snapshot. Found some bugs (as usual).

Updated my Bugzilla/DR to Bugzilla 2.16.3 base.

Urgh, that was stupid, prefixing /etc/sysctl.conf options with sys... Of course it wouldn't work. Now everything is ok, tcp ecn is disabled and I can access openoffice.org, netbeans.org, periodicos.capes.gov.br and so on...

Simple fantastic. After watching some Divx video at full speed (thanks GATOS for the awesome video driver!), some hints about photographs of space related stuff (lunar modules, shuttles, etc). Let me explain: a V-2 or a F-1 engine are, ahm, wonderful, you can't see that everyday. But maybe your girlfriend may not agree with you, mainly when you are taking photos from those and not from her. Well, some good hints:

'maneuver her next to the object you want to photograph- in this way she is flattered, and you have a useful size comparison in the photo to give it scale....but don't be too obvious about doing this...personal experience shows that "Now stand in front of the V-2...hurry...hurry, the museum will be closing'

"OK, Broad, now over there!"

Ah, newsgroups (USENET) are just fantastic!

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