8 Oct 2002 spicyjack   » (Apprentice)

Hulloa

Observer: Lost another hard drive a few days ago. I replaced a 9G SCSI and 60G IDE with a 120G IDE, so now this box has an 18G SCSI and the 120G IDE. Only problem was that LILO would not boot the 18G SCSI. Ooops. I fixed the problem by replacing LILO with GNU grub, which worked flawlessly. It took a little bit of time to get used to grub over using LILO, but it works great now.

Fujitsu Lifebook S-4546: Not much going on with the laptop, I'm still running kernel 2.4.18, and 0.5 ALSA. I've been playing with the movie players in Linux a lot lately, and here's what I've found:

  • xine (0.9.13): works good with DVD's, you can use the DVD navigation menus in Linux just like on a stand alone DVD player. Playing files works okay, it takes too many menus to load random files, playlists of files work nice however
  • mplayer (0.60.0): works good with individual movie files. I got it working with DVDs, but I can't move around in the disc at all.

stream-db: I tried coding in a file skip feature, so that when stream-db loads up the song_q table with random songs to play, it skips any song with the skip boolean field set in that song's record, but I don't think it's working. It's funny, when I have a piece of software that's working really well, it's hard to motivate myself to spend time on it to add little things.

PortaBoom: I'm currently working on a Perl script that will build a database of files, and from this database I hope to build a minimal running Linux distribution for PortaBoom. Having the database will hopefully also allow me to build packages of modules to add onto the base PortaBoom package. This is how I plan to add other software to PortaBoom, using specially created packages that include all of the binaries and control GUIs for the application that is contained in the package. I'm coming up with more and more ideas about how and where I can use PortaBoom, and I've got a long list of applications that I would love to see run inside of it. But first PortaBoom needs to go on a major diet, a 50M bzipped file is not acceptable to me, I don't think people will be as motivated to download it as they would for something that was say 10M in size. I think it can be done, hence the motivation for building the file database. If you would like to see the code for the file database building Perl script, I have it here: filedb.pl.

atari: I bought a pre-made SIO2PC cable from the guy in Poland who sells them (the SIO2PC link), and it works great. I sold the 130XE because it was not working correctly, and bought an 800 and an 800XL with 256K of RAM. The 800 is my game machine (M.U.L.E), and the 800XL is for hacking, I'd like to get back into coding 6502 machine language. The person I sold the 130XE to was the same person I bought the 800XL off of, he buys/sells old Ataris and recycles them.

misc: I just bought a condo in the north part of San Diego, California (Rancho Penasquitos), so I've been super busy moving from my old house in Ocean Beach to my new place. I don't even have a stove or refrigerator yet, so needless to say I've been eating out a lot. I should get ADSL hooked up in a few days, I got it from tfb.com in case anyone was looking for a decent DSL provider in Southern California.

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